Back in the early 80s at high school in chemistry class we had a beaker full of mercury we'd float nuts and bolts on. The teacher would just let us grab 'em out of the beaker with our bare hands.
Crazy stuff -- I'm still not sure how I feel about it. We've gone too far in the name of safety in some ways but in others it's needed as we learn more about the risk factors.
Regardless, my kids experience in school is profoundly different than mine -- very little hands on stuff or experiments. Hell, just going on a school field trip with your own kids requires a criminal background check...
I graduated highschool in 2007 and science class was devoid of experimentation. I remember there being a bunch of hype months in advance for a day where we just watched our teacher do something with a bunsen burner. I don't remember what she did with it, but it was undoubtedly within the realm of making food-dyed water boil over a flame.
I graduated highschool in 2007 and "luckily" our chemistry teacher assessed us with our bunsen burner skills every fortnight. We basically put all sorts of chemicals and heat them up; recognize what materials depending on color of the flame; create compounds from different elements; etc... Once some of that stuff splashed into my eye, after the burner was turned off and I took off my goggles. Off to the eye wash I went...
Oh, man. The eye wash tower. An eye washer and a shower rolled into one pipe that extended from the floor to the ceiling. The thought of ever working with a substance that could validate suburbia's property tax spent on those things was the subject of every kid's daydreams during science class. Or that poster of that girl with the seeing stick that said something like "Karen didn't wear her goggles. But now she doesn't need to anymore." Gee, Karen, I remember muttering, I'd at least like a shot at danger.
Six bunsen burners, test tube racks built into the three sinks, and an eye wash tower in each science classroom of my youth. Yet the only thing I remember doing in four years of highschool is an over-chaperoned field trip with drug dogs and watching baking soda, vinegar, and water expand a balloon (goggles on, of course).
Might as well teach class in a Willy Wonka factory but feed us celery all four years.
Maybe most high schools have gotten that way, but I had a very different experience. Made some chemical mixture in Chemistry that would go up in a puff if it was bumped. In my high school engineering classes, we stripped the motor out of a CNC router, attached a custom built head on it and then connected that router's computer to another control box we used to control two robotic arms, a conveyor belt, and a couple of control valves for water.
There are still a few good high schools left at least.
I realize the experience I described cost quite a bit, but for some context, our high school was in a blue collar town. We several neighboring high schools in white collar towns, that didn't have what we had (and in fact were sending a few of their students to our school to participate in these classes). Instead they had fancier sports teams and facilities than we did. It was a matter of prioritizing money and energy, not necessarily spending more of it.
We used to steal stuff from the chemistry storeroom and make bombs. Today that'd get you a visit from the DHS and probably onto some kind of terror watch list.
I did that too, and used to worry about it. Then I saw a video of a guy messing around with a giant tub of liquid mercury, talking about how it's not all that dangerous in that form.
As far as I remember, mercury isn't the best thing for you, but it's not as bad as people make out. It takes a fair amount of exposure to do anything too terrible. It's the compounds that become very nasty (eg, dimethylmercury).
Indeed. The equilibrium vapor concentration of mercury is, IIRC, high enough to be hazardous, and you only need a tiny drop to saturate a room.
This was all prominently on my mind as I broke a mercury manometer during an unofficial experiment in school and was trying to find all the little drops that exploded across the floor and hid themselves in the corners. However, I can say that it's a very efficient way to collect dust bunnies... ;-)
