Two things to note how high school has changed.
1. About half of the female students wear some sort of flip-flop as their footwear of choice. Of course, I saw this in college, but I figured parents would intervene with high schoolers. Then again, if Newsweek had to have a cover article about getting parents to say no, I should be happy that these young women are wearing anything on their feet.
2. Both of the papers that Sarah gets from home had a front page story last week about a teacher exposed to mercury. Turned out that when he moved a cabinet he discovered a pan with what was called a dime-sized amount of the metal in it. I can remember handling more than that - without wearing gloves! - in my high school chemistry class. That may explain a few things, actually.
Considering that a friend of mine seemed to always have some length of magnesium wire (it burns really brightly!), I think the overall handling of materials in my high school wasn't so great. I'm sure you can't find any loose mercury of magnesium in the place, now. Probably for the best.
28 September 2004
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2 comments:
One of my fondest memories from high school was the day we "found" about 6ft of magnesium wire, let me tell you that year Halloween was something to remember as record numbers of neighbors and law enforcement responded to reports of, as my friends Dad put it "the sun landing in the road", at midnight on Halloween.
-OTC
Bogg here.
In high school (I think - it may have been 8th grade) I had a science teacher who felt it necessary to illustrate key principles.
One day he brought a Van De Graaf machine in and made the whole class form a daisy chain, hand to hand. By the fourth or fifth kid in line, we were getting electrical burns just trying to get our hands together.
Later that year, as though it were therapeutic for the last encounter, he brought in liquid nitrogen. After doing the usual tricks (freezing a rubber ball, a rose, etc.) he stuck in a gym sock and had the class gather round. He pulled the sock out and had us all grab on.
Not to mention that our chemistry lab had no eye washes or safety showers, since it was ABOVE our computer lab, and a chemical emergency would have ruined the whole thing.
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