"NOW class, tell me, how do you buy a pair of shoes?" The teacher is plump, kindly, dressed in the kind of glossy emerald green blouse a Western woman would save for evening wear. Hands shoot up.
"Please miss, please miss." "Anya?" "Well, you go into a shop, you look on the shelves, you look for the colour you want ...
"And," finishes the teacher, "you try them on to make sure the size is right."
I am sitting like a fly on the wall, fascinated by this lesson in everyday life being given at Orphanage No 110 in central Moscow. The children have all the usual lessons - Russian, maths, geography, history - albeit in a simplified form because apart from being parentless, they are educationally subnormal. But they also need to be taught how to live in society: how to use the Metro, how to boil an egg.
"The things that other children pick up automatically as pare of family life, we have to teach our children," said Tatyana Malkova, the young nononsense director of the school.
Day pupils with learning problems are sent here to be taught alongside the orphans. The children are mostly the unwanted off spring of alcoholics. "We are seeing rising numbers of children damaged because their mothers drank in pregnancy or being rejected as infants. One girl here was thrown out of a window by her drunken mother," said Ms Malkova.
Alcoholism has always been the Russian national disease. Russians knock back the vodka with a thirst that would astonish even the most hardened Irish whiskey drinker. But Russians are drinking more than ever these days, seeking oblivion from the hardships brought by economic reform. The children are the ones who pay the price.
Whether they are slightly braindamaged or whether they have simply missed the love and attention in early childhood essential for healthy development later on, the children have little hope of becoming high achievers. But at Orphanage No 110, they get the best the Russian state can offer in these times of crumbling social services.
While other teachers in more prestigious schools have not received their salaries for months, the staff of the orphanage at least receive their meagre wages regularly, thanks to the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov. He is a likely future candidate for the Russian presidency and is committed to saving the poorest and weakest from going under.
The staff of the school are mainly trained as "defectologists" who help the children to learn through games in conveniently small classes. The pupils have tests instead of exams, do crafts rather than academic subjects and are directed towards trades such as tailoring and carpentry. In the summer, they are taken to holiday camps. This year they are going to the Crimean coast, a treat average Russian parents can no longer afford to give their children.
"Our school is like an island," said Galina Nikolayevna, the wonderfully eccentric art teacher with batswing spectacles and bird's nest hair. "Here we can protect the children. But eventually they have to go out and face the world, which is a pretty cruel - place in Russia these days."
After class 1 hang out with the kids, who are too old now to stand much chance of adoption either by Russians or by foreigners. Although they call their teachers mum and dad, nothing can replace the real family, and they are desperate for attention.
They all want me to write my name in biro on their arms. Then they tattoo me from wrist to shoulder with their autographs. However, for children who are supposed to know little of the outside world, they are surprisingly well informed about pop music. Will The Irish Times bring them tapes of Michael Jackson, the Spice Girls, the Pet Shop Boys?
I return a few days later with some tapes and, after an evening meal of mashed potato heavily sweetened tea in the canteen, we have a disco in the dormitory.
Slava, who looks like little Lord Fauntleroy in the bow tie he always wears - are his upper class parents dead perhaps? - takes my jacket like a perfect gentleman. Pasha shows me how to breakdance. Vasya holds me in a sweaty embrace as we smooch to Whitney Houston.
"You will come back, you will come back?" they chorus as I prepare to leave. I have seen some terrible sights in the former Soviet Union, physical conditions far worse than in this orphanage. But few things have frightened me as much as these children's insatiable emotional hunger.