Random high-school memories
Jul. 24th, 2022 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brooksmosesI posted this in a YouTube comment -- "That Chemist" is collecting firsthand stories of chem-lab disasters and near-disasters and narrating them -- and I thought some of my readers here might also enjoy the reminiscence. This doesn't involve any disasters (except for one experimentally-invalid lab design in a college lab class), but other commenters had mentioned cases where a "fill up a balloon with acetylene and ignite it" demonstration was rather more exciting than expected.
Chemistry behind this solvent-proof cut-tag blast shield
I had an excellent teacher for high-school chemistry. He'd been an industrial chemist before becoming a teacher, so he had lots of good stories and took us on a field trip to the local cellulose acetate plant (which was quite an olfactory experience). Also he had an excellent tremendous beard.
Depending on one's tastes, the worst dangers in class (or one of the best!) was that he also played in a bluegrass band. And so he on occasion brought in a guitar and serenaded us and the rest of the school with things like a love song between a chlorine atom and a sodium atom, featuring a chorus about "I'll change your name from Chlorine to Chloride." Apparently someone else's rendition of that one is now on YouTube, titled "Sodium Chloride: A Love Song of Science," for the rest of you.
He also was fond of doing the acetylene-in-a-balloon demonstration. He'd start by filling a balloon with hydrogen and demonstrating the squeaky "pop" that it made when ignited. He may have also done methane; I'm not sure. And then he would have all of us except for him and one brave student line up on the far side of the classroom from the fume hood, and we also brought in the students from the other three classrooms in that building, and he would drop a bit of calcium choride and water into a balloon and seal it. He had a long wick in the end of a yardstick so you could reach around a corner with it, and he and the student would take cover around the side of the fume hood and someone would turn out the lights and he'd light the wick and the student would carefully reach around the side of the fume hood with the yardstick and set off the balloon.
It was a very very satisfying kaboom.
And then a couple of years later I started college freshman-year chemistry, did the first lab class which involved experimentally determining the density of lead (I think) by taking a bunch of small lead shot and weighing it in a beaker and then adding water up to a fixed level and re-weighing it. I looked at the experimental results, observed that they were nowhere near accurate, wrote up a rather snarky lab report in which I used the measurements to calculate something *actually* unknown -- namely, the amount of water clinging to the obviously-still-very-wet-from-the-last-lab lead shot -- and figured out how to test out of the class.
Chemistry behind this solvent-proof cut-tag blast shield
I had an excellent teacher for high-school chemistry. He'd been an industrial chemist before becoming a teacher, so he had lots of good stories and took us on a field trip to the local cellulose acetate plant (which was quite an olfactory experience). Also he had an excellent tremendous beard.
Depending on one's tastes, the worst dangers in class (or one of the best!) was that he also played in a bluegrass band. And so he on occasion brought in a guitar and serenaded us and the rest of the school with things like a love song between a chlorine atom and a sodium atom, featuring a chorus about "I'll change your name from Chlorine to Chloride." Apparently someone else's rendition of that one is now on YouTube, titled "Sodium Chloride: A Love Song of Science," for the rest of you.
He also was fond of doing the acetylene-in-a-balloon demonstration. He'd start by filling a balloon with hydrogen and demonstrating the squeaky "pop" that it made when ignited. He may have also done methane; I'm not sure. And then he would have all of us except for him and one brave student line up on the far side of the classroom from the fume hood, and we also brought in the students from the other three classrooms in that building, and he would drop a bit of calcium choride and water into a balloon and seal it. He had a long wick in the end of a yardstick so you could reach around a corner with it, and he and the student would take cover around the side of the fume hood and someone would turn out the lights and he'd light the wick and the student would carefully reach around the side of the fume hood with the yardstick and set off the balloon.
It was a very very satisfying kaboom.
And then a couple of years later I started college freshman-year chemistry, did the first lab class which involved experimentally determining the density of lead (I think) by taking a bunch of small lead shot and weighing it in a beaker and then adding water up to a fixed level and re-weighing it. I looked at the experimental results, observed that they were nowhere near accurate, wrote up a rather snarky lab report in which I used the measurements to calculate something *actually* unknown -- namely, the amount of water clinging to the obviously-still-very-wet-from-the-last-lab lead shot -- and figured out how to test out of the class.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-26 10:35 am (UTC)Anyway the story goes that his previous job was at a school that was right by the river. So when he wanted to demonstrate the reaction of sodium to water, he took the class to the riverside to throw the sodium in there. The problem is that the river was home to a large number of ducks, and the ducks were much more used to people throwing them bread to eat. The tale I heard left a veil over exactly what happened next. But by the time he was teaching my class, he was using a bucket of water instead.