The most striking and beautiful demonstration I ever saw in science class was when Mr. Delmage took a hose, attached it to the natural gas feed, stuck it in soap solution, blew a bubble with the natural gas, and had a student stand by with a candle and ruler to ignite the bubble, which went up in flames that splashed up onto the ceiling, a sight I carry with me to this day.
In the subject of sinister teacher tricks, my chem teacher in grade 11 tried to get me to drink hydrochloric acid by having everyone in the room pound on tables and chant DRINK IT! DRINK IT! brrrr I told my parents about that one about a year or two later; they suddenly realized why I had complained about that school so much.
When my class began studying the '60’s in American History, the teacher showed a filmstrip where some group was explaining all of the possible conspiracies and all of the ‘fallacies’ of the Warren Report. However, as a part of their discussion, they showed the Zapruder film in entirety, and then took it on a frame by frame analysis. I got to watch the back of President Kennedy’s head explode, and I’ve loved history ever since.
The other, much more globaly interesting thing that a teacher (well, okay, a principal and administrator) showed me- we had an assembly on Driving Safety. In order to impress upon us the need to wear seatbelts, the principal had invited the local coroner over. And the coroner brought slides.
At least eight people left the assembly to go throw up before the show was over. I was smart enough to remove my glasses, thus allowing me to get a general feel for what was on the screen and listen to the dialogue without actually seeing the gruesome details. My favorite bit of recalled narration: “Now, in this slide, you’ll notice that the gentleman lying by the wrecked van, his arm doesn’t seem quite right. The reason is, as you can see by this closeup, (click) that’s because it’s not attached to his body.” (Crowd screams.)
Not a demonstration, just odd: My Indonesian teacher - who was a bit of a psycho, as well as speaking 14 languages, being a French commando and having a large collection of illegal swords - was wont to show off his glass eye.
He would turn to the blackboard, then with studied aforethought, remove his glass eye, set it on the desk and turn back to write on the board, with “I have my eye on you.”
Well, this may not be unusual, but it sure stuck with me. Or maybe it WAS unusual.
Anyway, I’m in 6th grade, and something naughty goes down in class. I can’t remember what, exactly, it was. We had one teacher, Mrs. Sawyer, who didn’t put up with much. She whipped around to see who did it and, not being able to tell, asked the class troublemaker, Bobby, if he did it. He said no. Then she tried to get a few other people to 'fess up, and none of them did. So she asked Bobby again, and he said, really offended, “I told you I didn’t!” And she stopped, apologized, and said to him “You’re right, Bob, if there is one thing I know about you, it’s that you don’t lie.” There was a lot of respect in her voice, and it just blew me away. Up to then, I’d always thought that being good in school meant being smart, listening in class, and getting good grades. It never occurred to me that you could be “good” for moral reasons that were completely separate from squirrelly behavior. I can guarantee you that if I had done the naughty thing, and was asked about it, I would have said NO and then been psyched I’d gotten away with it. That day was the first time I had to consider that someone like Bobby could be a better person than me. I have never ever forgotten that lesson.
For the record, I can also recall that Mrs. Sawyer called a class meeting–all 150 of us in a room together–when she got sick of us using the term “faggot” on the playground. She had the balls to talk to us all, tell us what it meaned, why it bugged her to hear us use it to each other as an insult. God she was classy. I always think of her when people talk about school systems tolerating kids being awful to each other (a la Columbine).
In High School, we did the chunk of pottasium (K)?? in water instead of cesium IIRC.
My English Teacher in 11th wore a football helmet on Hat Day and after reading some horrible poetry with one foot in the garbage can, he ran head first into the filing cabinet and dented it pretty good.
Ad Noctum, you tell Mrs.Ingram she’s a hottie! And should she ever feel the need to become a Ms. again, Here I am!
My Science teacher in Junior High, Mr. Sodaman, was a really neat teacher. He swallowed a sword on the last day of school. It was a real sword too. He banged it on the tables and had a few kids come up and make sure it was real. You could actually see it in his throat. It was really cool. He also blew fire for us.
My English teacher my freshman year of high school had us read Lord of the Flies and then showed us the movie in school. He only did it for our class because I guess the school decided it was too violent to be showing to freshman and he didn’t do it again.
I was taking a communications course and our prof was this woman who was very nice looking and very well endowed. As I went through the semester, I fully enjoyed going to this class, not only because she was one of the few prof’s I had that knew how to teach, but also because she really was quite stunning to look at. At the end of the semester I found out why she was so well endowed. We all knew she had kids at home. On the last day before finals, she had her youngest (4 and a half) in with her. As we were reviewing material for the final, her kid started fussing. She asked us if it was ok if she fed her kid while we were there, we all said ok. So she sat an undid her bra under her shirt and started nursing her 4.5 yr old right there in front of us. Not that we didn’t see anything (It was underneath the shirt), but still, breastfeeding in class AND to make it worse, breastfeeding a 4.5 yr old, right in front of us!
The second one:
Chemistry for El. Ed. Teachers. The prof had a glass filled with this dirty liquid sitting on the front table. We all could see this as we walked into class. As the lecture continues, we can see little black things floating up and down in the glass. The prof starts talking about water conservation and how you can naturally purify water in certain ways. Then he points to the glass and says that this water started out much more dirty than it was and that it was pitch black when he first started. He pointed to the black things floating up and down and said they were a special water-born fly that eats the impurities in the water. Then he took one out of the water, looked at it for a moment, then placed it in his mouth and SWALLOWED IT!!! We all freaked. Then we found out it was really ginger-ale and raisins! What a joke!
My high school honors chemistry teacher taught us how to make vodka and beer.
Our typing teacher had a nervous breakdown in the middle of class - she threw a typewriter through the window and started doing cartwheels down the hall. Eventually someone called 911 and she never came back.
A very pregnant substitute teacher’s water broke as she was writing on the chalk board; she had her baby three hours later.
I’ve seen all kinds of cool things in chem and physics but my physics instructor showed me something interesting in his role as track coach: just how fast my legs could move.
He had a steel grab bar mounted across the tailgate opening of his little Datsun truck. Anyone wanting a speed workout grabbed the bar as tried to keep up as he rocketed across the parking lot. We went no faster than a top sprinter could, which is to say a hell of a lot faster than any of us were able on our own.
When I was in college, I took a physiology class. This was a prestigious university, with a prestigious medical school, and one of the world’s leading experts on sex and sexual problems. This leading expert was a good friend of the Prof. who taught the course, so he came and did one week’s worth of lectures. He showed us many, many unusual things, and told us stories that defy repetition.
The one image that will never leave me involved a coming of age practice for young males in the Andean highlands. One thing they have a lot of in the Andes is Llamas, and they were featured in this ceremony. Ok, I’ll just say it: the boys fuck the llamas. The slide showed a boy and a llama, the boy/man had a big smile on his face and the llama was looking back at him with a puzzled expression.
I remember a demonstration from science class in my freshman year of high school, but for a different reason.
The teacher cut a strip of magnesium from a sheet. He switched on a Bunsen burner and, holding the metal with tongs, touched the other end of the strip to the flame. The magnesium caught fire and burned with a bright white flame. We sure took notes on that!
I remember it mostly because he had gone into the back room; when he came back out he said, “The President was shot.”
The date was November 22, 1963.
I can do that tongue trick as well as many others.
When I was in college taking Human Sexuality my professor showed us a bunch of porn. My favourite one of the bunch (straight, gay, bi, and other) was one where you see the inside of some cavity and the “penis” going in and out of it quite sensuously. It lasted several minutes and was quite bizarre but still a major turn on. The other porn movies were pretty nasty with dumpy looking crack whores and what not. Anyway, as the movie ends. It pans out and you see a guy peeling an orange. The “penis” was actually his thumb and the cavity inside was simply the inside of the orange. It was really cool.
My chemistry teacer (I had 1-2 last year and am in 3-4 this year, same guy) is cool. A lot of the kids don’t like him because he launches off into these stories that have little to no bearing on what we are doing. But I like that, it’s cool and it wastes time. He has done numerous experiments and things for us. The one I remember most is a week long one in which I got my hand stained with Silver Nitrate. I was worried. Remember?
