Alexei tried hard but his creative juices just would not flow.
"I was asked to write a poem about President Clinton, but he doesn't inspire me. I didn't feel the muse," said the 16-year-old aspiring poet and song-writer from Moscow's school 1240, where the Clintons will chat with young Russia before meeting old Russia, in the shape of President Yeltsin, later today. "Clinton is too arrogant and should listen more to other leaders."
As workers hastily laid fresh tarmac on the school playground and picked up empty Coke cans and Snickers wrappers - the ubiquitous testament to Russian youth's American love affair - Alexei and his friends were in pensive mood. The extent of US responsibility for Russia's devastated economy divided them.
"All this century western experiments have been conducted on Russia from above. First communism and now democracy. But Russia has to find its own way. We mustn't copy America," said Alexei, his shoulders hunched in his camouflage jacket, a hand-me-down from his father who works at the Interior Ministry.
"But I like the US for its freedom," said Vassili, posing confidently in Harley Davidson leathers. "Take Monica Lewinsky for example. In Russia, you couldn't do what she did - to publicly provoke the president like that! You can do many things in America that you can't do in other countries."
Mr Clinton will not need an interpreter to understand Vassili's sympathy. 1240 is a state school specialising in English language teaching and its pupils are only admitted after proving exceptional intelligence. Most of the children come from well-to-do families.
Alexei's fluent English is strongly accented. His father's Interior Ministry salary - even with "perks" - can not support regular foreign travel. But Vassili's English is tinged with an east coast drawl. The hard currency his father earns exporting steel to the West has paid for several trips to the US.
Their argument about Mr Clinton echoes a wider debate among Moscow's elites about how Russia should overcome the failure of its US-inspired "reform" programme.
While steel is sold profitably abroad, the industries which once put it to productive use at home, have collapsed. The re-introduction of protectionism and state support for manufacturing industry now tops parliament's demands.
Mr Clinton is expected to urge Mr Yeltsin and the acting prime minister, Mr Victor Chernomyrdin, to reject them. Alexei and Vassili's maths teacher, Ms Irina Vlasova, suspects his motives.
"America does not want a strong Russia because if we were strong - with a strong parliament, a strong economy and strong leaders - we would be powerful again," said Ms Vlasova.
The teachers at 1240 are untypical. The Moscow city authorities are the richest in Russia and regularly pay them their £150 monthly salaries. Thousands of teachers in the provinces have not been paid in months.
Fee-paying schools for Russia's new rich have thrived in the last five years. But most of Moscow's intelligentsia, its administrative, artistic and business elites, stick with the state sector, where the rigorous educational standards of the Soviet era are still observed.
To maintain those standards without government funding, parents do a lot more than sell raffle tickets and organise coffee mornings. Schools are undergoing a kind of involuntary privatisation, as mums come in to do the cleaning and dad does what he can to repair or replace faulty equipment. Unless a school is very lucky and is supported by rich parents, new books - let alone videos and computers - are an unaffordable luxury.
"The only teaching aid I have is this piece of chalk," said Ms Vlasova.