If you're a teen or "tween" student and you meet the Prime Minister of Canada, the last thing that might stir your blood is tales of how Stephen Harper was seduced by that most dismal science - economics.
And yet that's just what pupils heard Saturday morning just outside of Port of Spain Trinidad, where Mr. Harper took time from a Commonwealth summit to visit students at Maple Leaf International School.
Sitting around him, in a sort of campfire ring-style, the kids found themselves listening to Mr. Harper's educational resume.
"I went to university, that's where I got two university degrees," the Prime Minister told students at Maple Leaf, which sits in the shadow of a rainforest-covered hill in the Petit Valley area. "I am trained as an economist," he added, for emphasis.
And on it went:
"What I actually did was I started in general [studies]… then I got an interest in economics," Mr. Harper continued.
The kids, by the way, were troopers, and kept smiling throughout all of this.
At this point Prime Minister's Office press secretary Dimitri Soudas shooed away Canadian journalists so press didn't get to hear more enthralling tales of Mr. Harper's formative years.
Mr. Harper was visiting the Maple Leaf school to underline the fact it follows the Ontario education curriculum (which presumably means they too are required to suffer through S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders.)
The students - dressed in private school uniforms - played a stirring version of O Canada on steel drums for the Prime Minister, as well as the Christmastime tune Carol of the Bells. (Trinidadians take Christmas surprisingly seriously; hotels and malls are festooned with fake evergreen boughs and other trimmings).
The Maple Leaf school's tuition rates - about $9,000 for three semesters - puts it out of reach of many in Trinidad and Tobago, where nearly one in five people lives below the poverty line.
But students such as 17-year-old Willie Medford thank the school for preparing them to apply to Canadian universities, where their Ontario curriculum diplomas are accepted.
Mr. Medford is preparing to apply to the University of Western Ontario, where he hopes to study aeronautics to pave the way for becoming a pilot.
He's got relatives in Ontario and loves the spaciousness of Canada, calling it a break from the relatively cramped and more densely populated streets of Port of Spain.
"It's not as much hustle and bustle," Mr. Medford says of Canadian suburban life.
"Sometimes it's nice to get away from everything."
The 17-year-old, who switched to Maple Leaf school in Grade 9 and is now in Grade 12, said he likes the Ontario education system because it's more well-rounded than the mostly "book learning" of Trinidad and Tobago schools.
He likes for example how he was able to travel to Quebec for a mock UN assembly.
"You don't get that opportunity in our system," he said of Trinidad.
Steven Chase