My unique experience of making orange oil

I try not to write on here about work, because I worry that it's incredibly boring for anyone who reads this and doesn't work with children.
Today I am bending my own rules, because I suspect that this will amuse and entertain. Although, I'd thank you to keep in mind, that we were successful in meeting our oil making objectives, and as one child put as his reflective "What went well": "No-one caught on fire".

We made orange oil by heating a mixture of orange rind and ethanol in a small glass phial, which is stood inside a boiling tube with a little water in the bottom, this is heated, and the vapour transfered via a delivery tube to another boiling tube in a beaker of cold water, where it should condense into oil.

Normally I heat this with a bunsen burner, the kids set fire to the clamps on the clamp stands and I have to spend an hour running round the room with a bucket of water. The heat is too much and the water just boils and evaporates before any oil is produced.

Today I decided we'd try using candles.

I showed them all how to set up their kit, and gave them a candle each out of the massive box of candles I'd been given. It all started quite well.
Then I helped a student to sort out their clamp stand,- so we're talking maybe 2 minutes at most- look up and every pair of students have 4 or more candles to heat the water. It looked like we were taking part in some bizarre kind of religious ritual.
I was about to get cross, but then 2 pairs of students got their experiment to work at the same time- and collected orange oil, and it smelled like oranges too- so I just let them continue- clearly 4 is the number of candles required for this experiment.
Fine.

Well, it would have been fine, if at the end of the lesson 32 young people hand't insisted on singing happy birthday before they blew out the candles.
Traditionally I usually have "happy birthday" Sung to me in October, not July, and normally I get a cake, not a sink full of orange oil and washing up.

I tidied up and went for lunch feeling slightly exasperated- I told one of my colleagues who's son is in my class- She laughed and told me that he really enjoys my lessons, Which was lovely of her to say, because I do sometimes wonder if it's all a bit too bonkers, I don't remember being quite so enthusiastically crazy when we were at school.
Maybe I'm just old.