In chemistry class, in 1966, I asked the teacher what would happen if you dropped a penny into nitric acid. He showed me, but with a small square of copper cut from a sheet rather than with a penny.
He carefully poured some nitric acid into a small beaker and gently dropped the copper square into it. It foamed a bright yellow green for a moment, then became clear again–and the copper square was gone. :eek:
Post here unusual and surprising things your teacher showed you. 
My teacher showed us how he eats an egg raw. He did it every noon and upset a lot of the girls.
He was from Romania, and did a lot of gross stuff.
He would tell kids not to “stuff the tomato” in class.
When we asked what he meant, he picked his nose for nearly a minute, as a demonstration.
My anatomy teacher had testicles in a jar. I always thought that was funny. She also would tear into a fresh cat gloveless, juices spurting. She just had been doing it so long, she didn’t care.
My sixth grade science teacher, at the end of the year, showed us her father’s thumb that she had preserved in a jar. I don’t remember how he lost it, but I recall wondering why she had kept it. It was from his left hand, IIRC.
My 8th grade science teacher was missing a finger and would repeatedly show off the stub.
My current teacher didn’t show us something, but told us instead. He said that he gets to school no later than 5:15 every morning. That scared the bejeezus outta me.
As long as we’re on the subject of objects in jars:
My 7th-grade science teacher kept the placentas from her children in tubs in her classroom. Ewww. She said she was going to show them to her children for their 18th birthday or something, just as a gag. She kept 'em preserved with alcohol, but they smelled like crap. She brought them out and showed the entire class, too. Yuck.
Yeah, I don’t get it either. I won’t try to explain.
On the 1st day of 10th grade Chem 1, the teacher had a balloon full of hydrogen and a candle taped to a yardstick. You figure it out.
When I was in fourth grade, my science teacher dissected a cow’s eye in class. While he was cutting into it eye juice squirted out and hit a girl in the front row, who ran to the bathroom to throw up.
In tenth grade, my chemistry teacher showed us what happens when water and sodium metal meet.
My HS chem teacher once showed me what happens when you take a little itty-bitty sliver of cesium and throw it in a tub of water. It produced an effect similar to that of a jumping jack or ground bloom flower firework underwater.
A math teacher at my high school also owned a game room at a local strip mall. One night some friends and I were there and he sat down on a bench and his um … ahem “package” kinda hung out of one leg of his shorts. Yep, I gotta say that the most unusual and surprising thing a teacher showed me.
Come to think of it, it may have been on purpose because about a week after I graduated from high school, he called me and asked me out on a date. (I DIDN’T go).
Cool, cesium! My school could only afford sodium.
Unusual things we were shown or did:
[ul]
[li]Aforementioned sodium and water trick.[/li][li]Electrolosis of water, then turning off the lights and igniting the H[sub]2[/sub] collected in our test tubes.[/li][li]Cat disection. Each lab team had their own cat for a couple of months. (ewwww)[/li][li]My college bio prof had a collection of deformed fetuses that he kept in the basement of the science building. (Very freaky.)[/li][li]The last month or so of elementary school (6th grade), we all built Estes model rockets, then had a school assembly outside to set them all off. (Mine crashed because I hadn’t glued my engine mount in. :rolleyes:)[/li][li](done without teacher’s knowledge or consent) During HS chemistry labs, we’d pour a little nitric acid into a beaker. Then we’d put one drop at a time onto a quarter until we’d dissolved a hole through it. It made a very metallic-smelling orange gas.[/li]
We quit doing this when a guy from the group on the other side of the table asked what we were doing. He thought that sounded neat, so he asked if we could do it to a half-dollar of his. We said sure. He then tossed it over our peg board, *and it landed right in the beaker of nitric acid. Orange gas started pouring out all over our table. I put a larger beaker over it to contain it, but it just jetted out where the spout was. We finally got it into the sink and ran the water to kill the reaction.
Where was our teacher. He was up front, buried in his playbook for the girls’ basketball team, which he was the coach of. He was so oblivious.
[/ul]
My 8th grade science teacher was a nut, to put it mildly. We had a three week unit on fire, and the culmination was when we went onto the school’s lawn and he set some newspapers soaked in gasoline on fire in a metal trash can.
Then he sprayed water on the fire. The resultant fireball was at least 15 feet off the ground.
No one hurt, but three fire engines showed up
My high school physics teacher was a bit out there, too. He made a “bed of nails”, laid on it while holding a cement block on his chest, and let one of the football jocks break it. He also parked his Blazer on the sidewalk and tied it to a tree, then demonstrated how the shortest girl in the class could move it by pushing on the rope. The principal was pissy about the tire marks on the school’s pristine lawn 
–tygre
In horticulture, we tapped maple trees and our teacher made pancakes.
IN driver’s ed, our teacher told us how to hotwire a car with a screwdriver and how to break in with a hanger. (All the time, saying, “Don’t you DARE do this!”)
Your TEACHER asked you out? Yuck!
I didn’t see anything interesting from a teacher until college–then I had a physics professor who was quite a character. His best trick involved liquid nitrogen. He brought in a bucket of the stuff to do a few demonstrations–the usual stuff: dip a paper airplane in it and fly it into a wall (it shatters), dip a rose in it and slam it on the desk (it shatters).
Then he pulled off his wedding ring and dried his hand throroughly (at this point I, who had been working with N[sub]2l[/sub] for a year, saw what was coming–no one else did). He plunged his hand into the bucket of nitrogen, yanked it out, and slammed it on the desk. I think he and I were the only ones in the room who didn’t flinch and hide our eyes–his hand was perfectly OK, of course.
Quite an intro to thermodynamics…and if it actually needs to be said, “Don’t Try This At Home!”
My physics teacher would show the principles of electricity. Students volunteered to be electrocuted. (For an honors class, they weren’t too bright.) I made sure to inform him that I have a medical implant… anyway. One day, for extra credit, a kid sat in a wired chair for a minute or so. The bottom of his shoes were melting.
We made mini-Hindenburgs in class one day. Some kids got singed eyebrows.
One day MIT boy (one of my good friends) and I accidentally (heehee) mixed the wrong things and the whole class had to evacuate b/c of the smoke.
Good times, those were.
I first saw “Deliverance” in my 10th grade Lit. class. I always thought that was kinda odd.
whoops. My first accidental post. the above post comes to you courtesy of psycat not Demo.
Last day of Grade 6 our Gym teacher let me and my friend onto the roof of the school. He had to go up to kick some balls and stuff down, but i think me and my friend were the only two kids to have ever done that at that school. And then a couple of months ago we convinced our chem teacher mess around with thermite, we burnt a whole through the lab table and that was fun
well… the STRANGEST non-academic thing our teacher did was show us how many tongue rolls she could make…
(snapped a quickpic with my Digital Camera hahahahahha
http://www.geocities.com/adam_the_pyro_2000/ingram.html
the strangest this we DID to her, was we made a bunson burner shoot a bright blue flame 4 feet in the air… I suped up the gas and the air-intake, and fidgeted with the gas vlave a LITTLE too much… I wanted to scare her, not almost take out the ceiling… (if I woulda turned the gas valve to where I wanted it, the flames woulda been about 10 feet…)
ummm… lemme see… I stole ome Salt-peter, and brought a smokebomb to school the next day (4 grams salt-peter, 3grams sugar)… freaked the teacher out 'cause we were burning marshmallows to find their energy level, and i put the salt-peter on he marshmallow to create a smokebomb that lasted all day, stunk like melted sugar, and caused the teacher to panic…
I still tell her it ws the marshmallow…
and our teacher showed us how to be embarassed in front of the class, with no help from anyone else at all…
she was smooth
More than you want to know (hint to scroll past):
Actually pretty radical, for the time and place…in 7th grade the “Health Class” (i.e. sex ed) the school nurse actually told us the true facts. (This was in the late 60’s, when Ignorance as much more common than is widely assumed.)
We trooped into the gym and perched on bleachers, ready for more riveting information on dental hygiene (yawn) when the school nurse dropped The Big One. Keep in mind the audience was a laughably (by contemporary standards)ignorant bunch of adolescents who were clueless, hairless in ways that pertained, and intensely interested.
But not on bleachers in Health Class; not overtly.
This radical, sensible lady somehow scrounged up a plastic replica of the male torso (sheeted; scooted in on a library cart with squeaky wheels) to explicate sex.
The Torso was quite realistic–except for the knob on the hip that extended and rotated (!?) the crucial member in question.
It’s smarmy to laugh at a memory of honest education heroically given. Don’t know where nostalgia, humor and sadness intersect, but mine is that model of male anatomy with the knob on the hip. The nurse got fired; we young folk muddled around and lived to make brittle jokes about “left/right” dressing–referring to the knob–knowing everything, of course.
Know what sucks? I don’t even remember that nurse’s name. Her visual aids were awful, but she risked–and paid–everything for them.
Respecting real heroism,
Veb