Easter!

Even after doing the game show with all the classes, I still had one more meeting with five groups of my first-year students. Ever since trying it with my small group of third-years at my smaller high school back in January, I had been scheming a way to do Easter egg dyeing on a large enough scale for my first-year students to do it. My favorite part of Easter (apart from all the candy) was dyeing the eggs, so I wanted to recreate the fun of that for the kids. I talked it over with the teachers, and they happily agreed to it.

I started each lesson by asking the class what they knew about Easter, just as I had done with Halloween and Christmas. Not surprisingly, this drew many more blank stares than for the other two holidays. Two common responses were "Easter Island!" and recognition of the word "east," though. I gave an explanation that attempted to simplify as much as possible the concept of a man named Jesus being resurrected three days after he died. There wasn't any other way around it that I could think of--the least confusing explanation I found involved first asking the class why we celebrate Christmas. When everyone recalled it being a celebration of the birth of Jesus, I then explained that Christians believe that three (holding up three fingers for the slower kids) days after he died (with a little head-sagging tongue-lolling gesture), Jesus came back to life (raising a hand up). I know it could be done a whole lot better, but that's the best I arrived at, and I treasured those two or three heads nodding in comprehension. The teacher still had to explain it in Japanese, just to make sure everyone was on the same page. I remember wondering if any of the students were reminded of my Halloween lesson when I told the part about Jesus coming back to life. If they were, nobody mentioned it.

Anyway, I explained the second (and, I think, more culturally universal) reason for Easter--a celebration of spring. This required a lot less explanation from the teacher. Trying my best to simplify things and flow smoothly into egg dyeing, I explained that some people in Europe used to give eggs to their friends for Easter. I would ask each class why they thought people would give an egg. (After the first run-through of the lesson, for every subsequent group I would hold up a boiled egg at this point.) I could tell by the looks on their faces (there's a noticeable difference between confused bewilderment and simply refusing to speak up) that most of them knew, but it took a little goading to get one person in each group to speak up, even in Japanese. Once they did, of course they got it--things are born from eggs. They all understood that an egg symbolizes new life in general.

Once I got this far, I knew I was home free. I explained that, while some people paint the eggs, most Americans do it differently. I would then explain that people in America take a cup (holding up a paper cup), and mix water, vinegar (holding up a jug of vinegar), and food coloring (holding up a packet of the powdered food coloring they use here). Eventually I held off on showing the students the vinegar and food coloring, instead making them try to understand based on listening to me. Almost every class got it just fine. I then explained that you put the egg in the cup, wait, and it changes colors (holding up a dyed egg). I further explained that drawing on the egg first in crayon would make the dye set around the wax (holding up an egg so decorated).

At this point, I would ask the students if they had any questions, and then ask if they wanted to try it. After the five seconds of dead air that I usually get when asking the class something like this, followed by a few meek "yes"s, which in turn were followed by me asking again, I got a louder "yes!" from the group. I would then pass out paper towels, and distribute the supplies.

Each table of four students had four cups of different dyes--one each of red, yellow, orange, and green. (They don't do blue food coloring here, since blue isn't the most appetizing color for the Japanese palate.) I also gave them plenty of paper towels, and boxes of crayons. I also gave each student a hard-boiled egg.

That's right: every single student got a hard-boiled egg to decorate. I have twenty students per class, and I gave this lesson to five classes at my main high school. I also did this lesson with my tiny class of second-year students (7 kids), and the English club (10 students). My smaller high school also got a chance, with three classes of 20 students each getting to do it. I also wanted to have an egg for each of my seven teachers. In all, that comes to about 180 eggs.

I've never counted myself as talented when it comes to cooking. I can make sandwiches with the best of them, and I can cook up a respectable breakfast (my pride and joy is flipping an egg, something I've worked on since I got here). I make decent fried rice, and love to pan-fry salmon fillets. With the possible exception of flipping an egg, none of that is difficult. My point here is, I ain't a cook. Despite freely acknowledging this, I thought surely boiling an egg or two wouldn't be that hard.

That's not an entirely fair assessment, though. I can boil eggs just fine. What I wanted, though, was for each student to have a perfectly uncracked egg. I knew most of them wouldn't mind, but I didn't want one unlucky kid to get a cracked egg while all of his buddies had perfect ones, because then the feeling he'd most strongly associate forever with Easter would be shame and inadequacy. This is how badly I blew it out of proportion in my mind. It's not even that the cracks were that bad--they were just enough that dyeing would have made them obvious, which was too much for me.

I learned pretty early on that I wasn't too hot at cooking up perfectly uncracked hard-boiled eggs. I decided to fine-tune my technique. Yes, I researched egg-boiling, learning to make sure the eggs are covered by at least an inch of water; to add the eggs to cold water, never to warm; to add a dash of salt to the water; to bring the water to a boil for just a moment before letting it simmer for about ten minutes. Even after all of this, I found my Perfect Egg Average (P.E.A.) was about 60%. Try as I might, I couldn't improve that average predictably or reproducibly. I tried boiling more at a time (20 instead of 10), fewer at a time (5 instead of 10), bringing the water to a boil more slowly, letting the eggs sit out of the refrigerator for 15-20 minutes before putting them in--and the rate remained the same.

You can see where this is going. I needed a total of 180 eggs for these lessons. I actually boiled closer to 300. I learned to look on the bright side: they sell eggs here in cartons of 10, so I didn't have to spend as much energy counting by 12s to figure out how many I needed. I felt pretty bad toward the end, especially because I couldn't eat the flops fast enough. I brought some extras to school for the teachers (which they loved), and gave ten each to the two local JETs. Even so, my fridge was full of eggs for a long time. Evelyn, a Californian who lives near me, started calling me Hitler, even as she gleefully took 10 eggs off my hands.

The important thing, though, is that the kids absolutely loved it. They spent much more time decorating the eggs before dyeing than I expected--a few didn't even dye them. I learned from this that pencil, ink pen, and marker can survive the vinegar and dye just as well as crayon can. I've got plenty of pictures of all the dyeing here, and pictures of me with all of my classes (many of them taken after the egg dyeing) here.

Oh, and as usual, I was feeling gutsy with the more advanced classes. Inspired by the first student to recognize the word "east" within the name, I decided to give it a shot, and explained that the name Easter comes from the name of a Germanic goddess, and that she is associated with the sunrise, and her name is associated with the word "east." Practically everyone got that (all of my explaining was English), and I could tell that most of them liked being able to make the connection. A small victory, sure, but I'll take what I can get.

Also, I wanted to be able to teach the students when Easter is. I figured it was worthwhile, since every other major holiday I've taught them (Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day) has a specific date. I had to read a fair amount before I felt comfortable with explaining the computus, and even then, I had to settle for the simplest explanation, gutting the bit about the ecclesiastical lunar calendar. The work paid off though, as everyone took the explanation in stride. I also learned the words for "full moon" and "vernal equinox" in Japanese, too! I took a picture of it.

My favorite part of the lesson was telling the students that they could eat their Easter eggs. They all laughed at me--some of them were sure it wasn't safe to eat after dyeing, and the rest of them weren't about to break apart what they'd spent half an hour decorating.