The Chaotic Effect of Cake

In one of the first maths lessons of the year, our teacher made a small but unrecoverable error that basically caused the collapse of the entire lesson before it had even started.
She gave us cake before we'd actually started any work. Bad move.

Now cake is a good thing on the whole. Fewer things make a double lesson seem more managable than having a cake break scheduled. Especially delicious cake. But cake is a tricky thing, and it needs to be carefully controlled. Otherwise all hell breaks loose.

I don't know if it is just our class or if such an effect is replicated throughout educational institutions throughout the country/world. We have a neat little cake rota set up (Forget to bring yours in and die a messy death. Asides from that, it works brilliantly). We all anxiously await the arrival of the cake, debate what we think it might or should be. The cake comes in and ceremoniously set down upon the front desk. Our teacher then says something like 'We will have cake 5 minutes before the end' and we spend the next 50 minutes working hard, trying to make the time go quicker so we can eat the cake we've been eyeing up all this time. Or the teacher says 'You can all have your cake once you've done 5 questions from the exercise on the board' and everyone races through all the work for the lesson in lightning speed (except for me. If it's a maths lesson, everyone else has finished their slice of cake before I've even gotten onto the third question...).

But you never give cake before we've gotten into our work.

You see, if we've started a question, 80% of the class if likely to keeping going through that question out of determination (again, in my case, it's more stubbornness, but whatever). Then we are productive so the teacher is happy, and we get cake so we're happy. However, if you unleash the cake beforehand, as well as losing your bribery material (at least one of our teachers has openly admitted to bribing us with cake. It did work though), we spend between 20-30 minutes eating the cake, which isn't even an exaggeration. Our time is spent like this:
 5 minutes - Trying to find a knife or improvising, doing some fractions (see? Maths!) to see how many slices to cut it into.
5 minutes - Divvying up the cake (The above 5 minutes was merely cake cutting prep), passing it around, admiring and complimenting the cake
10 minutes - Eating the cake, 2 minutes finger licking optional
10 minutes - Discussing the cake, going back for any available seconds, trying to wash jam off fingers.
That's basically half a lesson gone in cake time if a teacher doesn't plan ahead for this kind of thing. I mean, the class is still happy, but the teachers tend not to be.

In summary, cake is a great motivator when used wisely. Its helpfullness in lessons has been embraced by all our teachers - though some give us biscuits instead. Less time wastage, but not the same. In fact, the only lesson we don't eat cake is Chemistry (and Physics when we are doing radioactivity) and that's only because our teacher decided the health and safety hazard of letting us eat acid tinted/radioactive cake, and the subsequent paperwork when we got ill, wasn't worth the benefits (though we as students fought hard for it). The 'healthy school' concept is dead. Long live the cake.

P.S. Now would be an ideal time to talk about cake. Anyone want to mention something cake related in the comments?