In 5th grade, our English teacher (my all-time favorite among teachers) had us read Booth Tarkington’s Penrod and Sam and do assignments based on it. She told us beforehand that there were racial stereotypes that would appear offensive to modern readers (kind of a primeval trigger warning).
What wouldn’t fly today is using the book in an English literature class at all.
I have an interest in teaching and was a TA for a number of advanced university math courses. There was a time when I knew a great deal about it.
I’m not a fan of “new math” being taught before or concurrent with the “old math”, although I have nothing against improving problem solving skills and looking at things in many different ways. I think it just clouds the issue. Teach reliable ways to get an answer quickly. Maybe one sensible alternative.
Once these methods are understood and all the other main concepts for that level are absorbed, you can introduce “math contest” style problems and alternate ways of doing the same thing which may or may not be easier or more abstract. There are many ways to do anything, but emphasize something that works and then talk about alternatives later on if time permits, since it is often lower yield stuff - My $0.02…
I recall my 8th grade science teacher (~1975) dipping his entire hand and wrist into a large beaker of mercury to demonstrate that it wasn’t really as harmful as people were saying. This was around the time they stopped putting mercury in thermometers and he was upset with that.
He also had white lab rats rats for pets and was the go to teacher for paddling kids when some extra effort was called for. Strange and scary dude.
Tenth grade science class, chemistry portion. We were being taught chemical reactions and how to mix chemicals for proper solution percentages. At one point a successful chemical mix created silver nitrate in solution.
Mr. Bradshaw described how long lasting silver nitrate remained on human skin. (He also said it was non-toxic.) He then told us we could dip our fingers in the solution if we wanted to. Of course we all did. I had a brown finger for a month.
I bet Mr. Bradshaw would not allow the dipping part again. And like others have said, he was a great teacher and I learned a lot.
The one I recall was a lab experiment in 11th grade chemistry where we floated a small tab of paper in a beaker, then put a tiny lump of metallic sodium on the paper, keeping your eyes no higher than the surface of the water in the beaker. The paper kept the sodium from scudding around the beaker. Held in place it got hot enough that the hydrogen coming off eventually lighted. I doubt that experiment would be performed today.
One educational method I wish were more widespread was the way my fourth grade learned the times table. A large copy of it was posted on the side of the classroom (up to 12, IIRC, I don’t know why). We were free to use it and never asked to memorize it. But at the end of the year, we all had, just from the continual use. Also during dull periods, I noticed things like how every entry in the 9s row was more in the tens column and one less in the units column. There are many other regularities if you stare at it long enough.
I wondered whether anyone else would bring up mercury. I have a distinct memory of my whole class being given globs of mercury to play with at our desks as part of a science class. Must have been sometime in the late 1950’s or very early 60’s. Maybe your teacher was given the same sort of demonstration when he was a child.
Probably the worst was when I was in kindergarten (1991 or so) and we had to do some sort of hearing test. We wore headphones which played various tones and had to fill up an entire column in Connect 4 before we could leave (i.e. get 5 correct in a row). I have a hearing loss and I was there long after everyone else left. The teacher didn’t seem to care about my hearing. I was in tears at the end of it. I still don’t understand why she had to be that way.
Ninth grade teachers at our school used to send kids on fool’s errands. Teacher A would send a kid off to teacher B to retrieve a metric adjustable wrench. Teacher B would say Teacher C has that now and send the kid there where Teacher C would say “Teacher A’s not getting it back until he gives me back my left handed stapler!”
Eventually kid would return to Teacher A empty handed.
(Oh, wait- you wanted things teachers did when I was in school, not what my fellow teachers and I did to students? Oops. BTW, a few hundred thousand volts from a Van De Graaff never really hurt anyone…)
We were beaten with a broken hockey stick in gym class if we didn’t behave in the locker room or tried to skip the shower. It was wrapped in blue cellophane to make it sting better, and was named “The Bluebird of Happiness”.
ISTM the nature of things is that a lot of laboratory chemicals are going to be inflammable, toxic, or both. Be it sodium, mercury, nitric acid, barium chloride, hexane, pyridine, sodium hydroxide, formaldehyde… Not to mention all those open gas flames! Also, let’s not forget educational experiments utilizing pitchblende and other radioactive sources,.
Oh, I have one!
Back in about 1987 or 1988, my high school biology teacher, who was a mildly crazy Jesuit priest, set us to dissecting frogs. Not too weird, right?
Wrong. Father F. had somehow scrambled their brains, so that their hearts were still beating, but they were essentially brain-dead.
We 15 year old 1980s boys had a blast with this- every lab table had a 9 volt battery with the leads separated so we could zap the muscles and watch them contract, and little bottles of adrenalin that we could speed up the heart rate with. Much to my adult chagrin, I was the little a-hole who figured out that if the spinal cord was laid open and zapped with the battery, both legs would very strongly contract in unison. I was also the one who thought that using the dissection tweezers as a launch ramp was a good idea.
Yep, I’m the guy who figured out how to make the frogs hop post mortem. Not long after, our lab was filled with flying frogs, much to Father F’s frustration and anger.
I had a geography teacher, also a dead shot with a blackboard rubber.
This what I was going to mention. Happened in primary school, early 1980s.
Pithing.
High voltage is fine. High amperage is not.
There are a zillion high-voltage generators out there. Van de Graaff generators, Tesla coils, Wimshurst machines, Marx generators, etc. The small ones are totally safe, giving off short sparks and a little zap. There’s not enough current or energy in the spark to cause damage. Large ones can be dangerous, of course.
Band teach with a baton. He would whip it, full force, at a student who was not paying attention. Sometimes all the way back into the percussion section.
Then, of course, he’d make the student pick it up (assuming the student still had eyesight at that point) and bring it back to him.
Also, the gym/swimming teacher had a large wooden paddle hanging on display and was not afraid to use it. I remember kids being whacked hard, while being told to bend over and touch their toes, wearing a wet bathing suit, in front of the entire class.
mmm
Mercury. I had forgotten how much fun that was. You could roll it around in little balls and we had big brass pennies in those days - if you rubbed mercury on the brass with a finger you could make it look silver like a half-crown (worth 30 pennies).
Later I had a friend whose dad owned a small garage. He collected scrap mercury from electrical switchgear which he kept in an open pail. He used to take great delight in asking some unsuspecting person to “just fetch that pail would you?” Mercury is heavy - you can actually float lead on it, so that pail probably weighed 40 or 50 kilos.
Our orchestra teacher wasn’t above throwing batons, chairs or music stands at kids, while cursing in Italian or making antisemitic slurs.
He was actually a wonderful music teacher. Until they made him Assistant Principal.
All our science class thermometers were mercury. And, of course they broke. We didn’t get to play with the mercury otherwise.
The episode that stands out in my mind though, was the semester I took speech class. Our teacher was only a couple years out of college and willing to laugh along with us. One speech we each had to give was a demonstration. A boy in class had read the warnings on a bottle of lye that said you should not put it in contact with baking soda and aluminum foil. Well, red rag to a bull, so he set up an experiment at home and then demonstrated it for us in class.
Now, the warning said nothing about what would ensue but he knew that a gas had been formed because he had captured it in a balloon that was lighter than air. Which he demonstrated (in an open window classroom). We all started debating what the gas might be. This was back in the 70’s so no quick way to look it up in class. The teacher said “I wonder if it’s flammable?” And we were off.
Demo guy put the balloon under a chair on the table so we could all watch, and held a lighter to the tied opening. It caught, and WHUMP! no more balloon. Well, we still didn’t know what gas was in it because that’s what a balloon is going to do, right? We argued a bit more and teacher made us all swear not to tell anyone. We knew she was nervous for good reason and never breathed a word. I’ll bet she never allowed such demonstrations again.
The gas was hydrogen.
I didn’t have a still, but I took some wine and worked at distilling it in test tubes at the junior high lab. This was after school and I remember one teacher, not my own, leaning into the classroom and taking a sniff, saying “Something smells good in here!”