Experiments involving fire have been known to cause injuries in high school chemistry classrooms. In 2014, two students at an elite public school in Manhattan were burned when a teacher used methanol to ignite different kinds of metal salts to create colored flames. Another chemistry class demonstration burned five students at a Denver high school in 2014, according to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.Teachers need to stop showing off. Colored flames. Pathetic.
October 30, 2015
"They said the chemistry teacher was demonstrating how the color of fire can change when something suddenly went wrong."
"They said several students near the experiment were engulfed in flames...."
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62 comments:
That whole chemistry thing is dangerous. Dangerously boring unless you actually do chemistry and that often involves flames. Chemistry labs have all sorts of safety equipment and I'll bet that the lab is safer than the stage the drama club uses. Certainly safer than any shop class.
Now this looks like fun. Probably had a future Nobel Prize winner decide that a career in chemistry wouldn't suck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEIcXnOjAOI
Colored flames. Pathetic.
It's the Bunsen-Kirchoff Industrial Complex, still making money from schools long after flame spectroscopy went out of fashion.
Yeah. Let's stop sports while we're at it, and also not let them drive to school.
Will Obama be do speeches to ban chemistry in high schools and across the workplace? It sounds like something he would prioritize.
Students lives matter.
The high school chemistry teachers of America await with baited breath your recommendations for how to engage the interest of their students.
Unless there are live flames, you're doing it wrong.
I remember in the good old days of junior high, we had a lab where we heated red mercuric oxide in a test tube to disassociate it, and produce elemental mercury (as a gas which condensed on the inside of the test tube as a silvery coat) and oxygen, which we tested for by taking a piece of wood, like a little Popsicle stick, setting it on fire, blowing it out, and sticking it in the test tube, where the extra oxygen would cause it to burst into flame again.
I can't imagine that being done today. And that's a shame.
"Breaking Bad" Althouse wants HS teachers to show kids how to make drugs. The isolation of caffeine from tea would do nicely -heating, cooling, filtration, extraction, recrystallization. If you could skip the extraction step (obviating flammable, volatile solvents) it could be done.
Another lab could be the distillation of beer or wine to get at the ethanol.
Yeah Science!
chickelit said...
Colored flames. Pathetic.
It's the Bunsen-Kirchoff Industrial Complex, still making money from schools long after flame spectroscopy went out of fashion.
However, they replaced the flame with a plasma hotter than the surface of the sun, and still use the same principal.
I'm sure there a more than a few flame atomic absorption specs laying around in old labs somewhere. I used them for years.
You tell 'em, Prof! What have scientists ever contributed to this world, anyway?
I want to hear the story of how Althouse (a third generation chemistry student) was smarter than her HS chemistry teacher and this post is just a 50-year-old grudge. :)
However, they replaced the flame with a plasma hotter than the surface of the sun, and still use the same principal.
I did a internship for SOHIO in Cleveland out of college. My landlord ran the ICP lab there. He used to analyze crude oil samples from the North Slope to determine the feasibility of drilling and refining. That was "dirty oil."
Ann, this is one of those 2% of the times you are wrong and your readers are right. Our chemistry teacher blew stuff up for us and it was one of my favorite class in HS. It made things interesting while at the same time reminding you of how dangerous stuff was.
Seriously Ann? This is exactly the type of demonstration that would get a kid excited to learn chemistry and do the hard yards of studying and you belittle it. Of course you never studied STEM subjects, so what the fuck would you know?
Why women should not be in charge of the schools.
My degree is in chemical engineering.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why a chemistry teacher would do this demonstration (flame colors of metal salts) by pouring methanol on a table. The demonstration is easily, impressively, and safely done with no flammable liquids at all. One lights a Bunsen burner and dims the lights; one dips a probe in a solution of the metal salt, and puts the damp end of the probe in the flame. The flame burns different colors for different salt solutions. No one gets hurt, and it still looks cool.
You badly need a copy of The Dangerous Book for Boys Chemistry Set.
My chemistry sets when I was a boy would be outlawed today. Plural sets!
"The flame burns different colors for different salt solutions. No one gets hurt, and it still looks cool."
My wife's parents lived at the beach for a year after their house burned down in the Bel Air fire. We used to collect driftwood for the fireplace and there were beautiful colors from the sea salts in the wood.
@bearing: For all we know the lab wasn't plumbed for natural gas obviating Bunsen burners. The teacher could have been trying to meet a curriculum which demanded flame testing and was improvising with an alcohol burner. A student could have carelessly caused the fire. Do we know? Do you know?
Anyways, Althouse mocked the notion of "colored flames." That's what I'm reacting to.
You tell 'em, Prof! What have scientists ever contributed to this world, anyway?
Not as much as lawyers. (Talking quantity here, not quality.)
By the way, that should be "flames of color."
Why women should not be in charge of anything.
My chemistry sets when I was a boy would be outlawed today. Plural sets!
Mine had a chunk of asbestos. Real soapy feel.
Had to go to my pharmacist for mercury, though.
I didn't go very far in life. I still live in the neighborhood of my youth.
I was appalled to learn that the shop classes of my junior high school were gone. These gigantic rooms are now devoted to classroom learning.
I amaze my kids with things I learned in junior high shop class.....oh, yeah...I love the equipment that can be rented at Home Depot!!
I suppose they don't pass the ball of mercury around the room from hand to hand nowadays either.
You tell 'em, Prof! What have scientists ever contributed to this world, anyway?
Awlringt besides the roads,sanitation, irrigation, education, wine, fresh water system ,medicine, aqueducts- what have they ever done for us???!!??
bearing -
That is exactly the way we did it in Chem.
@Ann,
at the University I used to attend, the Chemistry majors always had an exciting show during Campus Open House.
They called it the "Whiz-Bang" show.
They probably did things the way @bearing describes, rather than using a pool of ethanol.
They also had fun with balloons filled with various gases. Touch the balloon with a hot igniter, and hear how loud the bang can be.
I wonder if U-W Madison's Chemistry Department does something like that?
My prep school science teacher (he taught chemistry, physics, biology, and general science) never burned any students or buildings, but he did blow a hole through a plate glass window).
He was in the lab alone preparing a demonstration for the physics class of what a trajectory is. He'd brought in his single barrel shotgun, which he'd fixed into a vice on a lab table. He had removed the powder from several shells (so the only propellant was the primer). His plan was to put a piece of wooden dowling in the barrel, and then fire the gun, so the students could watch the trajectory of the dowling as it flew across the room. Unfortunately, the powderless shell didn't have much power, the dowling just barely fell out of the barrel to the floor. So, he thought, maybe I can increase the energy delivered to the dowling by inserting a cloth patch between the shell and the dowling (like the patches used in the old muzzle-loading muskets). So he did that, and then had the further idea that perhaps he needed a heavier projectile, so in lieu of the dowling he used a ball bearing.
When he fired the shotgun the ball bearing flew straight across the lab, through a plate glass window, across the adjacent walkway, and smashed into the brick wall of the study hall building across the way. This awakened almost all the students in the study hall. No lives were lost.
Later, the teacher explained to us what had happened, and he treated this as a teachable moment. You see, he said, in constructing any experiment, you should only change one variable at a time. But I changed two variables, first by adding the cloth patches, and second by replacing the dowling with the ball bearing.
I have never forgotten that lesson.
Colored flames make feminists feel unsafe. Chemistry professors need to give trigger warnings and provide Play-Doh and humback whale songs for students who get the vapors.
Among other things I taught science at the middle school level for several years. Using fire and chemistry tricks was a great way to engage all the students. They watched and paid attention. Some even learned. Lunch in the cafeteria was more dangerous.
Yeah and @bearing describes the right way to do that
'trick"
I loved chemistry class. The things we got up to would probably shut down a modern US high school, and certainly would have gotten us on a terrorism tracking list.
No can do, anymore. I don't know if civilization is collapsing or has advanced beyond me. Either way, its boring.
Maybe it's unfair to risk women by letting them take chemistry.
a teacher went *running down the hall*, her shirt still *on fire* [emphasis via * added}
Sweet jumpin'.
Talk about a horrible example.
I found that if you ingest enough mercury and lead over the years, you will wind up being able to carry on a decent conversation with a law professor.
Dude, don't forget the osmium. Osmium talk drives the anosmic nuts!
"Teachers need to stop showing off. Colored flames. Pathetic."
Don't worry, lawyers will punish everyone involved and ruin chemistry classes for everyone.
It should not take an expert to safely handle flame--this is one of those; Any adult should have type skills. And echoing others: Spectroscopy is really important to chemistry.
Teachers need to stop showing off. Colored flames. Pathetic.
I refuse to believe that any sentient creature, even a blonde, is this stupid. She's putting us on.
Pretty sure we're not supposed to say "colored" anymore.
I had to take freshman chemistry at U. of Wash. - don't know why since the course did not cover anything I had not learned in high school - there was 350 students in an auditorium, and the prof. was a Nobel winner, but all I remember is once when he blew soap bubbles with a hydrogen gas tank and then set them off with a long glass wand torch. It was fun, but not educational.
At summer camp we got to mix sugar and potassium with traces of other things and layer them in a test tube immersed in sand. Then we added a couple drops of sulfuric acid. Roaring colored flames! (And a broken test tube and melted glass. It was great!)
The colored flames are important. An easy way to detect traces of certain things.
These classes were all show, but the students had to attend. The actual teaching was done in lab classes taught taught by grad students. I thought they certainly do things in strange ways in America.
I later came to understand that in the U.S. campus pecking order, professors have not really arrived until they are excused from doing any teaching at all.
Michael K said...
You badly need a copy of The Dangerous Book for Boys Chemistry Set.
My chemistry sets when I was a boy would be outlawed today. Plural sets!
It didn't take us long to make black powder. After that it was pretty much;"Dad. Can you get us a pound of potassium nitrate? Dad. De we have any powdered aluminum?"
So, when the kids were on fire did the color of the Flames change?
i know that people on fire will burn, but I want to hear about the colored flames.
Rusty said...
It didn't take us long to make black powder. After that it was pretty much;"Dad. Can you get us a pound of potassium nitrate? Dad. De we have any powdered aluminum?"
Black powder uses charcoal, not aluminum powder, tho aluminum makes great firecrackers. (From Jr High I recall the proportions by volume - cuz we didn't have a good scale - were 12,10,9...but in what order?)
Powder extracted from cap-gun caps was the gateway explosive.
When I was little, we stole ammunition and whatever else the German troops got careless and left lying around loose. After the war, there were the lightly guarded ammo dumps, and then dynamite from construction sites.
We took the bullets out of rifle ammunition and filled the powder from 3 rounds into one shell and crimped it shut with a short length of fuse. The brave ones would try to judge how much fuse was left and throw the thing so that it exploded in mid-air. A number of Norwegian men about my age are short some fingers on their throwing arm.
Colored flames. Pathetic.
What a fatuous and ignorant comment.
It's a chemistry class. It's a chemistry demo. Did you think that chemistry doesn't involve chemicals? Did you think it doesn't involve fire?
Different elements burn with different colours because they have different transition energies. Anyone who knows anything about chemistry knows that.
But then again, I saw the demo.
Just started reading John D. Clark's Ignition! Clark was head of the Army's liquid rocket fuel lab for many years and survived the experience. Persistence with google finds a free pdf of the book, which is spendy on amazon. Derek Lowe has separately written about stuff he won't work with - chlorine trifluoride and dioxygen difluoride (aka FOOF) are a couple. ClF3 will burn wet sand - yikes.
Fern.
The alum. powder was for rocket fuel. And later for home made thermite.
The professor is jealous because nothing she does right or wrong in her entire career can matter as much as what this chemistry professor does right or wrong in the spectroscopy lesson. Ann, do you mind that your interests and your career are trivial, or as long as you get paid and have a good time, it's all good?
Chuck, little help on the pdf?
Sounds like poorly trained teachers who did not practice good safety procedures. Pouring more fluid on the flame was stupid. It's like lighter fluid on flames and besides the splash, what happens when the flame travels back to the bottle? I always think of a neighbor who did that with a bbq, the stream of lighter fluid lit up and the can exploded setting the man on fire and his polyester shirt melted into his skin. He was lucky to survive, but horribly disfigured with months of painful treatment.
The teacher was careless. End of story.
Teachers need to stop showing off. Colored flames. Pathetic.
Boloney. Colored flames are essential in analysis of the composition of various substances.
Teachers need to acquire some prudence and common sense prior to Bunsen-burner demonstrations, and those doing the teacher-hiring should include practical knowledge as well as book learning in the required qualifications.
Teachers need to stop showing off. Colored flames. Pathetic.
@Althouse, Con Law professors can tell chemistry teachers what should be in the curriculum when chemistry teachers can tell Con Law professors what should be in their curriculum. Seems only fair.
Nichevo
Try sciencemadness.org. For me at least, Firefox doesn't display it correctly. A download option is opening it with Acrobat.
"... chemistry teacher poured flammable liquid onto a desk and lit it with a Bunsen burner."
Sounds dumb as hell.
Next up:
"...physics teacher sprinkled radium in everyone's hair..." What could go wrong?
Stop, drop, roll. What ever happened to that (something actually useful)?
Sheesh. With regard to that gal who, in supposedly hero fashion, raced down a hall aflame: Is it too disrespectful to suggest that she's also the sort of thinker, amid chaos, who, ignoring excellent advice and procedure, would not first put her own oxygen mask on before attempting to be in the position to save others (including little children)?
Seriously. W.T.F.
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