A few minutes before quarter past eleven last Friday saw the auspicious (or merely suspicious) phenomenon of the date and time lining up in a satisfying little single file, like a row of dominoes. 11:11:11 11/11/11. I knew that when the moment came I would be at school, teaching a group of 10th graders, so I thought it would be fun to mark the occasion in some way.

All my other lessons on Friday were in some way concerned with November 11 as Poppy Day: the tradition in Britain of wearing a red (and/or white) poppy to commemorate all those who have died in the services since the First World War. It also gave us a chance to discuss the role of days of remembrance and commemoration in society, and to compare traditions in Hungary with those in the UK. In one class we looked at a lesson in Solutions Intermediate that focuses on Poppy Day. Some students were already aware of the tradition of wearing poppies. Some had already learned about it, others had seen poppies being worn on TV by Premier League football managers and UK X-Factor judges. Some interesting discussions emerged about whether or not it is important for a nation to honour its war dead.

I decided to do something a little more light-hearted for the 11:11:11 class. I’d read Hadley Freeman’s piece in the Guardian about ‘Corduroy Day’ but didn’t think that wearing three items of staid corduroy would achieve much other than making me look like a parody of the English teacher I already am. I’m not much of a dominoes fan, and the thought of messing around with dominoes in class stirred up the feeling of torpor that washes over me whenever I see those Dutch students on TV trying to break the world record for falling domino chains.

If I’d wanted to be really cruel, I could have just announced that I was giving everyone ‘a one’ to mark the occasion. Instead of using letters for assessment (grade A, grade B, etc.)  in Hungary teachers give students numbered grades from 5 to 1. The failing grade is 1. That would certainly have made the lesson memorable! In the end I went for Kit Kats. Four bars got me sixteen sweet singles. Then to work. It was a race against time. The group had the task of setting up some kind of image on the IWB to act as a backdrop to the epochal photo, while also deciding how best to arrange  the Kit Kats as a visual prop. The internet was down (of course) so they decided to create a powerpoint  slide instead. The chocolate bars were snapped and nibbled into shape and with the clock ticking away, a tableau began to emerge.

Then, right on cue, our resident student photographer grabbed his camera for a buzzer-beating group photo. Mission accomplished, the students took their seats and polished off the evidence.

It was then time to debate whether the moment we had just marked had been of any real significance or not. We looked briefly at the  topic of numerology and also discussed  the story of Egypt’s closure of the Great Pyramid  – which, again, the students had heard about.

After the lesson, when I got back to the staffroom – which is situated under the classroom –  one of my colleagues asked me with a smile what we’d been doing in class. She said they could hear the laughter and commotion from below.

“It sounded like you were enjoying yourselves.”

We were!