I don’t really expect much from this, but if some middle school teacher can get that many responses to his thread, then I can get, what, 5?
Do you enjoy it? What makes primary education exciting for you? Are you going to stick with it for a while? I enjoy science, but I’ve always figured that teaching the same material over again would get really annoying.
Do you tell your students chemistry jokes? If so, could you relate some of your favourites?
My chem teacher in school always told the most awful jokes; it made class much more intersting. Example: What was the raven doing in the lab? Looking for a chromate. 
Did you ever put this on your board?
Or ask
Q: What weapon can you make from the Chemicals Potassium, Nickel and Iron?
A: a KNiFe.
Who is a pirate’s favourite scientist?
Arrrr-henius!
Are you a “safe” teacher or the kind who does redox demonstrations while standing in a cloud of chlorine gas?
What’s the most spectacular experiment that you regularly get your students to perform? Have you ever had a stereotypical “explosion” in the science lab?
Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible!
Do you get to demonstrate interesting reactions, or have legal concerns limited you to “safe and boring” demonstrations?
Many years ago, my school had a wonderful chemistry teacher who could be counted on to do something exciting (run!) at least once a week.
Have you caught any of the kids trying to make LSD afterhours? Or is that just the college kids?
How much of your teaching is lab vs theory vs problem-solving?
(Chem Eng here and I blame my HS chem teacher; well, and my parents, who wouldn’t pay for art school…)
Sorry, one more, and on a more serious note: do you find that interest in chemistry (and other “hard” sciences) is waning, and do you have any particular ideas on how to revive it? How do you try to make chemistry more appealing and accessible to HS students?
I’m intrigued, as someone who did an A-level in chemistry (equivalent to studying it at 12th grade, I suppose) but then dropped it without regrets - what is it that sparks people to go on and have a career in the subject?
PS: You’re up to 10 replies already. Not doing to shabbily. 
I liked chemistry in high school. (I used to take notes in cartoon form, which was cool when we got to electron orbitals.) I also remember being thrilled when we actually got to use E=mc[sup]2[/sup]. 
Do you still do the demonstration with dropping sodium into water? If so, did it look like this?
What grade are your students in? Do your students do a lot of hands-on labwork? Have legal considerations restricted your course? Do you still call the CRC Handbook of Physics and Chemistry the “Rubber Bible”?
Remember, you are either part of the solution or part of the parcipitate.
Brian
What was the most interesting explosion or other other failed student lab experiement you have experienced?
How do you deal with students who store little bits of chemicals and such from various experiments in their locked lab drawer, then when they have a nice little stash, put them all in the crucible and turn up the bunsen burner to see what happens?
That’s what I always did during high school chemistry. Amazing I lived through it. Teacher never caught on.
What random (and dangerous) stuff do you have in your classroom?
My HS Chem teacher had a couple mason jars full of MErcury. Heavy as heck and I always thought it was stoopid to have them in glass jars that could slip out of your grasp.
Ever have to use the emergency shower?
-Tcat
I think primary education usually refers to elementary school.
Congratulations on not choosing what one of my college labmates chose.
All our synthetic labs follow the same format: there were a series of “kinds of reactions” each person had to do, but we got different examples and at different times. For example, I could get “methyl adipate” as my esterification for my first task, while someone else got “ethyl acetate” as his several months later. We were told what product to make, we had to find one recipe for it, run the calculations on how much of each raw material we’d need, give the original recipe and the list of materials to the TA, he checked both and signed the list of materials. We took this list to the warehouse to get the materials.
Once, the TA tells a classmate of mine “careful with this one, make sure you mix the reagents in exactly the order the recipe says; if you mix the rest without this one, that’s black gunpowder, which explodes from looking at it too hard.” OOoooOOOOOoooo, my labmate thinks! So, he writes a zero after each amount in the list, once it’s signed (his handwriting was very similar to that TA’s), runs the recipe just fine and then takes out the biggest porcelain dish he’s got (about 16" across) and pours the ingredients for gunpowder in it. The dish promptly started sparking. He tossed it in the sink, upside down - just in time. The gunpowder exploded, sending the sink down and the dish up. Thankfully he’d been at the end of the bench, so there were no wires and gas lines over that particular sink. You can still see the bump on the ceiling underneath and on the floor of the lab above ours. The school decided to leave both of them in place, while fixing the rest, as a warning to future pyromaniacs.
Since our school had a policy of “you break it, you pay it” they added the repair costs to his usual “end of year labware bill”. It was enough to pay for a new car of one of the smallest models.
I did mention he was at the end of the bench, right? Two spots to my left - if he’d been in my spot, I might never have gotten old enough to write this.
We had some accidents that were more photogenic (like that time a reflux boiler caught fire and it was aflame in seven places), but that was the only one that brought the teachers from the high school next door running to ask what had happened.
My high school chemistry teacher was Elaine Ledbetter. She wrote some chemistry textbooks, although I’m not sure if any of them are still in use these days. I had her for AP chemistry and liked it so much I signed on to be a teacher’s aid in her class my senior year. Never did learn how to make LSD.
What do you find is the hardest topic for your students? If you teach AP, do you feel that you have to skim over several topics to get to all the items on the syllabus?