Schools, Bombs, and Flamethrowers (all part of the educational process)
An article about a high school student fighting expulsion over incidents involving chemistry experiments with explosions brought back some interesting memories, and thoughts about how times have changed. In this case, the student's chemistry teacher apparently demonstrated to the class how to make a "bomb" with aluminum foil, household cleaner, and an empty soda bottle. Not surprisingly, some of the students decided to try this on their own, and now the school is trying to expel those students who decided to repeat the demonstration.
Keep in mind that simply building something which makes a loud BANG (which is apparently all these "bombs" did) isn't hard at all. Dropping chunks of dry ice into an empty soda bottle and screwing the cap on tight does the trick. I know this from experience. Even the old standby of vinegar and baking soda might be sufficient. These kinds of noisemakers don't cause any damage--except possibly to eardrums--because the soda bottle can't contain enough pressure to cause a damaging explosion.
But times have certainly changed.
When I was in high school, about twenty years ago, I had been assigned to do a demonstration for my advanced chemistry class about rates of chemical reactions. I figured I would do two reactions, a slow reaction and a fast reaction. For the slow reaction, I found something in an old chemistry textbook which took about a minute to change from orange to purple.
The fast reaction, I decided, would be a flamethrower. I filled a squeeze bulb with aluminum powder, and rigged it so that when I squeezed, the powder would spray into the flame of a bunsen burner.
The first time I tried this after school one day, I squeezed very carefully, and got a gratifying flame about ten inches long. Pleased with myself, I called the chemistry teacher in (she was "supervising" by grading papers in the next room, which shows how much she trusted me to not burn the school down).
I reset the apparatus, but this time, I squeezed the bulb just a little harder.
FOOM! A superhot flame of aluminum powder shot eight feet across the lab, licking against the far wall. Nothing was damaged, despite the fact that aluminum burns very hot, but the room was filled with a fine white dust. We turned the exhaust fans on, and left the room while we contemplated whether aluminum oxide is safe to breathe.
Far from getting in trouble, the teacher agreed that this would make an excellent demonstration of a fast chemical reaction, and noted that I certainly knew how important it was to squeeze the bulb very carefully when demonstrating it in class the next day.
Of course, this was a more innocent time, before the shootings in Columbine and the subsequent paranoia about aspirin and nail clippers in school. Today, I'm sure, the school's defensive logic would have taken my chemistry experiment, extrapolated it into the likelihood that I secretly wanted to burn the school down, and referred the matter to the juvenile justice system. Never mind that the same effect could have been achieved with a match and a can of hairspray.
I am convinced that there is an innate part of us which really likes watching things burn or go boom, especially among boys. Perhaps the solution is to offer a pyrotechnics elective where students can make things go boom safely under the supervision of trained instructors. Any whiff that a student might be an actual troublemaker automatically disqualifies him--thus providing both punishment and removal of the dangerous tools in one fell swoop.
You see, just like sex, explosions are too tempting for teenage boys to experiment with. Teaching nothing but abstinence means that those who experiment anyway won't know how to do it safely.