Easter: Preparation for second-years

Easter isn't until April 12 this year. However, with the way the school year is set up, April is dominated by freshman orientation, placement tests, and lots and lots of meetings and introductions. That means the nearest blocks of time sufficient for teaching Easter are in March or May, and who wants to celebrate Easter in May?

Like last year, I was determined to go to any lengths to ensure all my students got to decorate eggs. Tsushima High is set up such that the ALT never sees the same group twice--I see groups 1 through 4 of the first-years, group 5 of the second-years, and groups 6 and 7 of the third-years--which means most of my lessons can be recycled without fear of boring anyone except the teachers. More on their Easter lesson later.

At Toyotama, however, my second-years had class with me last year as first-years. Iwase-sensei and I talked about it, and decided doing the same thing again would be boring. We toyed with the notion of having an egg hunt, but ultimately weather and logistics--no plastic eggs in Tsushima; and preparing 50-70 boiled and decorated eggs, many if not all of which would be dropped, was something we preferred not to do--nixed that idea.

We next thought about having an egg decorating contest. We wanted to afford them more time than just one class, though, and worried that unrefrigerated boiled eggs wouldn't stay edible more than a couple of days, and might start stinking after the week we were planning on giving them. Iwase sniffed around on the Internet for more ideas, much like we did for Halloween and Christmas. She stumbled upon an alternate way of preparing eggs for decorating: emptying a raw egg of its contents, leaving the eggshell for decoration.

Neither of us having any idea how to do this, and with a free afternoon, we bought some and tried it out. Using a pushpin to poke two holes in the egg, we stood over a bowl in the sink and blew. It took a long time--about fifteen minutes per egg--but slowly the contents dribbled out. The chalaza was the trickiest part, as it clogged the hole.

Not pleased with the amount of time it was taking, we did what lazy, frustrated primates do: we experimented. I tried using a paperclip and stirring the egg's contents, to make it come out more evenly and quickly. Iwase procured a plastic syringe from the science classroom, to save the effort of blowing to apply pressure on the egg. Stirring only saved a minute or two--no appreciable difference--and the syringe, though faster and easier, required a bigger and thus more visible hole in the shell.

Despite the length of time it required, we decided to go with it. We wanted to give each student one egg, which amounted to a total of 52. We split the load, each agreeing to prepare 26 at home.

The first evening I did it, I tried desperately to make it faster. I expanded on my stirring approach, using an unfolded paperclip to stir the contents. When that didn't save much time, I reasoned that warming the eggs might make them more runny and thus flow more readily. To accomplish this, I first tried leaving them out instead of refrigerating them. No dice: with highs still only in the upper 50s, they were only slightly less cool than they would be in the fridge. Next, I tried soaking them in hot water. Better, but counterproductive: the time spent warming them more than erased the time saved in actually draining the egg.

My third and final method for warming the eggs was microwaving them. I was careful not to go longer than ten seconds, for fear of the egg exploding. Indeed, this did make the egg thinner, which markedly decreased the time required per egg. Emboldened, I tried microwaving them longer, eventually going as far as twenty seconds. That, however, ended badly, as I was left with a cooked chunk of yolk inside the shell.

At this point, I was more than a little frustrated, so I grabbed an egg and shook it. I wasn't going anywhere with this; I just had frustration to vent, and thought better of chucking a raw egg at the wall. After a few seconds of shaking the egg, I thought about it, considered the possible effects of shaking it, and gave it a shot. Sure enough, the egg spilled out much faster. It didn't get much faster than eight minutes or so per egg, but that was almost twice as fast as it was to begin with.

Of course, after emptying that many eggs, I was left with a very large bowl full of mixed egg. If it hadn't been 11pm, I might have tried making a ginormous omelet. I wasn't comfortable saving it for breakfast in the morning, since by that point it had been sitting out for an hour or two. While wondering if ingesting that much cholesterol in one sitting would kill me, I poured it all into the trash.