Lab. Every student’s favorite part of science class and sometimes the most dangerous. In a room where teenagers are told to set things on fire and throw bouncy balls, it’s bound to go wrong at some point. Our science teachers have some crazy stories from the chemistry and physics labs.
Our school’s physics teachers are known for having some of the wildest moments in class. Physics teachers David Mower and Scott Painter have had a few accidents in the physics lab.
One day, Mower was doing a lab about inertia. The lab uses a duct tape covered cup filled with water and is held on a string. The cup is spun around, demonstrating how inertia keeps the water in the cup due to the water trying to move in a straight line. It’s straightforward and Mower likes to have some fun with the students.
“What I would often do, I had two of these cups…I demonstrate, switch cups, they don’t know it. Now I’ve got an empty cup. They just saw me fill it up with water, but I really switched it for an empty cup. I’m doing stuff, get back into the demo, and let go. I ‘accidentally’ let it fly across the room and watch the panic, everyone freaks out, it’s really kind of funny. But it went straight towards the face of a brand new student who had just transferred in mid-year and it was her first day in the class,” Mower said.
Painter had another egg-cellent story to share. This lab involves four students holding a sheet at an angle and one student throwing an egg as hard as they can. The lab focuses on momentum and the angled sheet will stop the egg and keep it from breaking.
“I had one of the pitchers on the baseball team in class…so he winds back and he goes to throw it. One of the girls holding the sheet got scared and just dropped the sheet. The egg went flying and skidded all over the floor. And so since then, whenever I do it, the eggs are in bags,” Painter said.
The physics department isn’t the only one with wild incidents. Chemistry teacher Paul Hessler has had his fair share of laboratory run ins. Hessler’s experiment involves heating magnesium with an open flame. The magnesium then glows a bright white while in contact with the flame. When the lab is finished, the magnesium is supposed to be extinguished in a calm, simple manner.
“One way to do that is to put it in a beaker or to put it in the sink and turn the water on. So a student, either not paying attention or perhaps misunderstanding, instead of taking the magnesium and just running it under the faucet, walked over to the safety shower, turned the safety shower on, and put the magnesium underneath the safety shower, thus flooding the entire room,” Hessler said.
The most extreme story goes back to the physics lab with physics teacher Deborah Waldron. Waldron’s lab highlights Newton’s Law and uses a bottle with nails pushed through the sides with a cork and rubbing alcohol vapor, attached to a string. The purpose of the lab is to get a spark to jump from one nail to the other while the alcohol vapor reacts. The gas inside the bottle explodes pushing the cork to the right and then the cork in return, pushes the bottle to the left.
“It worked great, except I put a little too much alcohol into the bottle. So when it exploded and the flames came shooting out the back, it burned the string, causing the whole thing to swing like a pendulum through the class, where it then fell onto a pile of papers, causing a fire, which we then quickly put out and didn’t pull the fire alarm,” Waldron said.
