393. Last lesson

 'Miss, do you like cheese?'

I knew getting them interested in Shakespeare on the very last session of their final year of school would be a challenge. Did I really think I could take it on?

On top of that the cheesecake I had been promising (drawing a slice on the board every time someone gave a good answer) was now sitting on the front row. 

'There's no cherry on my cake ... what kind of cherry could we have on the cake?'

They gave me all sorts of silly answers and I had to give them lots of clues. To soften the blow I called on David Gilmour (whom they did not know) and Taylor Swift (they did know about her) to present Sonnet 18. That's how far as I got.

'Yes, I like cheese.' I said, thinking this was about the cheesecake.

'No, I mean, do you like cheese like goat cheese and stuff?'

'Yes, I do like cheese.'

The girl had been writing away and I had not said anything, thinking hey if she had to finish some kind of homework on that day maybe I could just pretend I was not aware of it. Still, homework due on the last week! What kind of really badly organised teacher would do that? I would not! So I had to let it go in solidarity with my poor disorganised in an end of year panic colleague.

Then I had an other really bad idea. To ask one boy to come to the front to present his work for the final oral exam. The boy is very reluctant and keeps looking around. That is when the confident girl at the front takes the matter in her hands.

'Actually, Miss, we've prepared something for you.'

And it's all the way down from here. They give me a book where everyone has written down their favourite recipe (hence the urgency in the writing which was not a homework but a recipe and the questions about cheese) and a little note about how they enjoyed the course. Forgotten William Shakespeare and his beautiful sonnet, my pupils don not care about literature anymore, all they want is to eat the cheesecake and make me promise to cook all the recipes in the book. I do promise, even the recipe that require the cheese from the grand-parents's sheep farm a 40 minute drive away!