That apparently wasn't good enough, so our teacher decided to demonstrate issues of scale. He kitted us out with face masks and riot shields (don't know where he got those, and I'm not interested in exploring how he got them for legal reasons), picked up his jar of sodium and other bits and pieces and took us down to the teacher's car park in front of the school.

With mechanical long tongs and effusive warnings for us not to ever do this (ever ever), he dropped a much larger piece of sodium into a beaker of water. The results were one large bang, a small mushroom cloud rising into the air, the apparent disintegration of the plastic beaker and a small portion of the tarmac, a former-English teacher principal peering out the school office window and our science teacher screaming "COOL LETS DO THAT AGAIN WITH HCl!!!"

We didn't. The principal came out and had words with him about OH&S and nice new cars and so on. So we went back to the classroom with him muttering about, next time using Potassium or maybe Lithium all the way.

Issues of scale came up again and again and again that year, it's honestly a wonder none of us were killed that year. Great teacher, though. He retired the year after, but I met him at a train station once and he still has a crazy glint in his eyes.

I'm a teacher now partially due to his inspiring me. I work full time with gifted students who are much more devious than he ever was and probably much smarter than I ever was. Every day I take my life and my health/accident insurance policy in my hands.

To help astronauts stay in 1 spot they put in a steel mesh floor whereby a square plug fastened to their boots to push into that floor mesh. Women use a suction device with a vacuum nozzle when they had to go.

The animal detritus was also eventually vacuum suctioned when they perfected devices that work in space. These were actually gravity creating devices designed to work in non-gravity, a truly masterful piece of practical engineering.

From what I was told at Redstone Arsenal where they train astronauts in how to function in weightlessness, one task was to swim and defecate into a diaper. Try it some time, it ain't as easy as it sounds. But that is how astronauts learn how to solve non-gravity problems.

Thank you to Cliff for his generous offer and to everyone for the great comments!

This is not a really great story, but it's one of my proudest moments.

My first hour class my senior year of high school was Physics. By the last quarter of the year, to combat the "senioritis" that had set in, our teacher offered a prize to whoever could make it to class on time every day for that whole last quarter. My best friend and I were able to accomplish that feat (no small achievement when the classroom was across the school from our lockers), and we were the proud recipients of "I (heart) physics" bumperstickers. Mine is still on my guitar case, over a decade later.

My freshman General Chem lab was a total disaster most days. One day stands out in particular. My group of friends in that lab had gotten the reputation of being the last to understand stuff, bugged the teacher with the most questions and were always the last ones out of the lab. We called ourselves the “speds” (special ed kids). This one day it was the end of class and we were supposed to finish up our experiments and clean up…our professor stepped out for a few minutes. One of my lab partners was quickly trying to heat a test tube over the Bunsen burner and it exploded on her, and another lab partner got startled by the sound and dropped the teachers stapler, which he had been holding, into a vat of waste chemicals. Meanwhile I had walked over to the sink to dump out my test tube, not realizing that the waste product was supposed to be collected into a separate container, and when it hit the water in the bottom of the sink it created this purple smoke cloud. I was panicking not knowing if I had just created some toxic gas. (I don't remember what experiment we were working on) All this happened pretty much simultaneously, and our professor waked back into the room right in the middle of it. He just gave us this priceless look that told us he though we would all have bright futures as Wal-Mart greeters. Luckily we survived all those years of chem labs and our many other screw-ups, and now one of us is a science teacher, one is a physical therapist and I am the assistant manager of a toxicity lab.

Of course, this triggered the fire alarm for the entire school. So he we were, laughing and carrying on, while all the other kids were evacuating as orderly as possible, the teachers had looks of "there's not a fire drill scheduled," and the principal, in a panic, sprinted down the outside stairs towards our classroom to see if his school was going up in flames.

I think the burning sugar experiment was suspended after that.

"Oh, shoot!" she said, "That was sodium."

Genius that she was, my teacher decided to use that as another part of her lesson. She filled a beaker with water and dumped it into the sink.

BOOM.

The water pipe exploded.

She's still teaching there, unfortunately.

In my senior lab, my friend and I had to do a project using 123 (high temperature) superconductors. We decided to take some of the liquid nitrogen and pour it into a 20-ounce plastic bottle. After taking it outside, my friend screwed on the lid and threw the bottle into some bushes. Next thing we know, the plastic bottle cap came flying out of the bushes (along with a bunch of leaves) and pegged my friend in the forehead. He had a small welt for the next two days. The only thing he could do that night was drink while everyone else laughed their butts off.

I kept this up the next semester until spring rolled around with its obligatory bee activity. I got another jar and put a label on it with "Synth March 9- No.114- coAMp + gCNA” and put a living bee in it. I heard my neighbor out I the hallway and I yelled "YES!" and then ran out the door leaving it open. Naturally, he entered my room and saw the living bee in the jar and thought I had actually synthesized a bee.

I also left out a notepad with drawings and scribbles to make it look like I was attaching a small camera and microphone on Frankenbee114 and had notes about working with Kyle in the EE department.

He was so flipped out that he wouldn’t talk to me anymore and I heard he was telling people he was nervous about his neighbor (me) and what he (I) was working on. I kept this up until the end of the school year when I came clean with him. It took me two weeks to convince him that Frankenbee114 was really 5 or 6 bees I kept catching and putting in the same jar to prank him.

In first grade, during recess one day, I decided to try something I'd been curious about. Most of the kids in the class had just figured out how to push themselves on the swing set, and I became fascinated with the motion of the swing, particularly how the ropes seemed to go slack the closer the swinger got to the top of the swing set. I decided to try and recreate the effect on the monkey bars. The monkey bars ran perpendicular to the base of a small hill on the playground, and I decided the best way to do this would be to run down the hill at full speed, jump and grab onto one of the bars and swing up, hoping to feel my arms go slack like the ropes. It worked, to a certain point. I ran down the hill, jumped, grabbed the bar, and successfully swung up so that my body was now parallel with the ground, around six feet in the air. And just as I'd predicted, my arms went slack... and then I lost my grip and fell flat on my back; it knocked the wind right out of me. When I got back to class, I asked the teacher to explain what happened, as it was a Montessori school, she sat down and explained (in very general terms) centripetal force, motion along a curved path, and (unfortunately) gravity. It was then I knew I wanted to study physics.

The second story concerns a college professor, he taught both the quantum mechanics courses at the university I attended. He is a great professor, but he had all these quirky sayings and terms, and used an odd system of units (the speed of light was always 1, to make the math easier, and time was measured in some variation of inverse joules.) One day each semester, someone in the class would create a bingo sheet, with one of his phrases or terms or lines in each box, and the whole class would play bingo during his lecture, without his knowledge, at least until someone stood up and shouted, "bingo!"

(This instructor also told me about the halcyon days when he would take a coffee can, put a huge chunk of sodium metal in it, then toss it in a lake and shoot it with a shotgun. What I wouldn't give to be a chemist in those days)

I also had a gifted physical chemistry instructor who decided one class period we would go out into the common area and spend the entire period doing the "electron ballet," a dance which involved us running around in circles orbiting each other and exchanging electrons in a weird balletic red rover game. God that class was fun.

Finally (I'm totally cheating by making this a threefer+), during a synthesis class, a classmate of mine had to generate hydrochloric acid gas. The way you do this is by VERY slowly dropping hydrochloric acid into sulfuric acid. This generates an insane amount of heat, but if you do it slowly and ice the reaction vessel, usually it's no problem. This guy turned the stopcock on flask holding HCl a bit too fast. Immediately he knew there was a problem, so he slammed his fumehood shut. Within about 5 seconds, his entire glassware setup and anything else that was under the hood essentially vaporized. Needless to say, the lab instructor was not happy.

These are just tidbits. I graduated from an engineering school, and environment which breeds just about the weirdest and most brilliant professors and classmates.

Then we imagined the lazy barnacle. The barnacle has the largest penis to body ratio of any organism. The male barnacle needs this immense length in order to find a female that may be several barnacles away. We thought about what a human male would do with such a penis. Picture a lazy man lying on the couch in his boxers watching TV or perhaps just waking up from a nap. As he sits up, he rubs the drool from his chin and realizes that he is in the mood for some loving. His mate is no where to be seen and he is still feeling sleepy. What should he do? Since he doesn't want to get up he sends his male organ out on the hunt to find his partner, “Honey! Honey are you there? Where are you?”. Love without ever having to leave the couch!
Our favorite was snail foreplay. Snails do not have the benefit of a nice bottle of wine or Barry White to help them prepare their mates for some candooling. So how do you think they tell their mates that they are in the mood? First, they tenderly cuddle up beside each other and then, when the mood is just right .... they shoot each other! That's right, they shoot their beloved in the neck with a dart made of calcium. How's that for smooth?
Now five years later I may not remember the difference between acoelomates, pseudocoelomates and coelomates but I sure do remember their mating habits.

"Was that sexual harassment?"

I replied: "...little bit?" - just to watch him go green. And then we had a nice laugh.

I would like to report that I got an “A” in Organic Chemistry- my second time through it.