This Teacher Offers an ‘Eggstra’ Special Science Class

“I hope I don’t kill Listo,” says 12-year-old Celisse Villarreal as she climbs onto a counter top in the corner of her eighth-grade science classroom. “I want him to live.”

With that, she raises her homemade model car--a half-gallon orange juice carton decorated with yellow and blue stars and crescents--over her head and places it at the top of a wooden ramp some 10 feet from the floor. At the bottom of the ramp, 18 feet away, her classmates gather behind a miniature brick wall.

Celisse lets go. Three seconds later, the juice carton, having reached a speed of 10 mph, collides with the brick.

“Boom!” cheer three students happily, as Celisse runs to the scene of the crash. Slowly, she peeks inside to see whether her passenger is injured.

Listo--named after her family’s dog--is an egg.

He and his egg brethren are the stars of science teacher Carl Harmon’s “crash test lessons,” the centerpiece of a unit on motion that consumes much of the fall at Belvedere Middle School in East Los Angeles.

Harmon takes his eggs as seriously as his students do. The teacher has devoted much of his free time to making the egg a key ingredient of the curricula in schools across the country.

With some $12,000 in corporate grants, he is compiling an instruction guide for egg and crash physics, with a Web site, video and workbook for teachers who want to emulate the strange goings-on in his second-floor classroom at Belvedere.

Harmon is, in fact, continuing a proud tradition. For generations, scientists have used the egg to engage young minds. A common science lesson involves devising a way to drop an egg without breaking it. Health teachers have used the egg in talks on nutrition, and biologists have found it handy for lessons on reproduction. Even baseball coaches have used the egg as a tool. (“Hold the ball lightly, like an egg.”)

“Eggs are fun to throw and break,” Harmon says. “And I believe that students learn best when they can break and destroy stuff without getting hurt.”

The 17-year teaching veteran does not at first seem like a master of disaster. Bespectacled and soft-spoken, he moves slowly around the classroom. His jokes are light and usually fall flat.

But when the time arrives for classroom experiments, Harmon gleefully breaks out a variety of toys to be used in a series of collisions.

“He’s our Indiana Jones,” says student Carlos Alvarez, 13.

The son of two teachers, Charles Harmon--nicknamed Carl--worked as an engineer before finding a home in the classroom in the early 1980s. He has taught at Belvedere since 1992. He first encountered the egg as teaching tool when he was a student himself, in an introductory engineering class at UC Davis. The professor required students to figure out how to drop an egg from a nine-story building without breaking it, such as by using a parachute or a container for the egg.

For all his delight in mock collisions, he carries with him a special sensitivity to real-life crashes. His grandparents were killed in a car accident when he was 16. His brother-in-law was lucky to survive a motorcycle crash a decade ago. And six years ago, he lost a student, Vanessa Avila, to a car accident. She was not wearing a seat belt, he says.

Harmon says the crashes sparked his thinking. Could he teach science and promote safety at the same time?

The result is an interactive eighth-grade science class that is part physics, part chemistry, part driver’s ed--and all show business.

A look around his classroom hints at the variety of lessons. A huge box in one corner is labeled “Roller Coasters.” An intricate ball of connected paper strips hangs from the ceiling with a sign: “I AM A COLD VIRUS.” The pumpkin on Harmon’s desk asks: “Can You Guess How Much I Weigh?”

At this time of year, attention is focused not on the blackboard but on the 18-foot-long ramp that dominates the west end of his classroom. It starts at the ceiling and ends in a sand pit on the floor. Harmon cobbled the ramp together with lumber and fasteners.

In the early lessons, Harmon demonstrates the ramps himself. He puts a series of eggs on vehicles and sends them down the ramp into a collection of bricks he assembles over and over into a wall. Usually, the eggs break, and as students clean up, he reminds them of the need to wear seat belts to prevent their heads from cracking open similarly in car crashes.

“I might be in trouble,” he says during one class period. “We’re supposed to be preventing violence in the schools.”

In time, Harmon cedes the ramp to his students. Their assignment is to design a car that can carry an egg down the ramp and into the brick wall, without even the smallest crack in the passenger.

That gets students’ attention: If your egg breaks, you fail.

Students are encouraged to use recycled materials. The bodies of the car are made from half-gallon milk or juice cartons cut open on one side for easy access to the egg.

Bumpers are made of cardboard or newspaper. Foam cups provide a crumple zone. Balloons and tennis balls become air bags.

The egg itself is usually held inside a smaller milk carton, often stuffed with cotton padding. Harmon’s students run test after test in search of the right combination of defenses.

The lesson doesn’t stop at the ramp. Harmon requires his students to weigh their cars each time down the ramp. They also use stopwatches and a radar gun to record their vehicles’ speed and acceleration.

By the end of a recent class, students were absorbed in using the speed and mass measurements to calculate the energy of the hurtling cars.

There is plenty of noise--but virtually no disruptions--in Harmon’s classes. At Belvedere, he teaches six classes, with four periods devoted to students identified as gifted and two for students in tracks made up of recent immigrants whose English is weak.

Students from all six periods struggle at first with Harmon’s high-stakes test.

“I’m afraid I’m going to fail,” says Jesus Bravos, one of the gifted eighth-graders, as he struggles to devise the right bumper. “Eggs are for eating.”

Across the room, Carlos is so confident of his car’s stability that he has added an American flag to the back. David Garcia says the classes remind him of his grandmother, who was recently injured in a car accident in Mexico.

He has learned that eggs, like passengers, fare better if they are protected and restrained. “This class has convinced me it’s safer to always put on my seat belt.”

David has his eye on the certificate Harmon hands out for devising a safe car. “I Survived the Crash Test,” it says. But a classmate may get there first.

Celisse has yanked her beloved egg Listo out of the car. The vehicle looks a little battered in front, but its passenger is fine.

“I didn’t kill Listo,” she says, holding up the egg. “He’s not even cracked!”