So, I get an email from some cheerleading functionary from SOCMA, Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association. In it, the sending party gushes that they are endorsing a program to assist public school chemistry teachers in cleaning out their collection of “dangerous chemicals” from school stockrooms. I promptly replied that I thought it was a terrible idea. There has been no reply.
Well, I said a bit more than “I think it’s a terrible idea”.
But how could a rational person conclude it’s a terrible idea? Here it is. If I thought that the proposed clean-out orgy was limited to ancient bottles of peroxidized ether, great steaming heaps of calomel, or dried out picric acid leftovers, the I agree, let’s get rid of it. But I know safety people. Safety people do not like chemicals. They would prefer that we limit our chemical handling to baking soda and vinegar, and even at that, we need full protective garb.
Safety people will clear any stockroom of all of the interesting and useful chemicals from the shelves if given the chance. Safety people will dress up in bunny suits with respirators and tape off the area in order to do this clean out. I can just see it. The chemistry lab barracaded with red cones and yellow tape behind which the “hazardous material team” carefully packing jars of copper sulfate and ferric chloride into blue plastic drums filled with vermiculite. The school principal, a former kinesiology major with an administrators certificate, just stands there shaking his head at the prospect of what horrific things could have happened. Another school saved from certain tragedy.
As I’ve said before, reactive chemicals are useful chemicals. If we banish reactive chemicals from our stockrooms, we’re left with petrolatum and NaCl. It is all part of a tragic dumbing down in the name of safety. Just because safety staff feel insecure about chemicals, do the rest of us need to have our hands tied? Handling a chemical is like handling a knife. A knifes very utility is manifested in its sharpness. Yeah, you can get cut. But we recognize that the usefulness outweighs the risk.
We should all be skeptical of this trend to replace authentic experiences with virtual experiences. All students should witness how tiny bits of sodium or potassium react with water. Limiting such real experiences to video experiences is wrong. Students should get to see and do the real thing.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
i agree with ya 🙂
as far as video goes…every year my high school chemistry teacher showed an old laserdisc of alkali metals reacting with water. it was everyone’s favorite. while the reactions looked pretty cool, though, they also instilled in us a fear of chemistry. years later, when generating sodium ethoxide–my first actual experience with sodium–i was more than a little afraid of setting something on fire. guess what? didn’t happen.
Yeah, a lot of teaching folk are pretty silly about this kind of thing. You know, the cheerleader types who embrace every new pedagogical method that comes out. I shouldn’t be so critical- they do mean well. I am very skeptical of those who say that our education system is completely screwed up. It really isn’t that bad. Which country gets the most Nobel prizes every year? Yeah. The US of A.
What people have forgotten is that the student population is actually some approximation of a Bell curve. And, not everyone has to be a scientist or engineer or physician. But we need to made damned certain that we keep some fraction of the population headed in that direction. Luckily, they seem to do it on their own. Our job, as the grownups, is to make sure that we do not block bright and ambitious people from these loftier fields.
Th’ Gaussling
I was actually encouraged, by my high school chem teacher, to make NI3. Yep, there was a loud BANG.
Now I am Dr. Chemist.
All thanks to that great NI3 explosion.