One of this editor's friends blew up a solution. It involved an overdose of calcium carbonate, but the friend was okay.

This editor did the same with copper carbonate.

This editor once caused the evacuation of a high school after accidentally dropping sodium in the sink in a senior chemistry lab. As can be expected, the pipes exploded, there was a small fire, someone pulled the fire alarm and the school was evacuated with the fire department on its way. No one was hurt, and classes continued after it was confirmed to be an accident.

Similarly, this editor's father would occasionally recount tales of a former workplace, where bored employees would occasionally throw chunks of sodium out of windows during winter, when the ground was covered in snow...

Once in high school, our chemistry teacher told us that the day's experiment would produce pure oxygen as a byproduct, which we would capture (by holding an upside down test tube over the tube we were combining the chemicals in) and then light with our bunsen burners, to "prove the experiment was successful". You'd better believe that the entire class did everything right and got their experiments done that day.

This Troper had a similar experiment in high school, only with matches and several glass cups (because the school was too cheap to provide us with actual equipment). Eventually, we began combining the glasses of oxygen at different angles and shattered one of the glasses in one explosion.

Might you two mean hydrogen instead of oxygen? Oxygen can't catch fire or explode (but it can make an existing flame bigger).

Uhm...Therefore, it '''''does''''' catch fire!

Technicaly burning is form of oxidation. Hence the oxygen cannot oxidate but can increase or decrease the rate of oxidation but it cannot oxidate itself.

One of this editor's friends caused an explosion by carrying a lighted splint past a gas tap he didn't realise was open. The wall was singed but the teacher didn't notice.

This troper once had his high school's chemistry teacher described to him as someone who, since he was nearing retirement, tried to have a lot more ''fun'' with his classes than might otherwise be expected. This included causing explosions whenever possible.

This troper's chem teacher blew stuff up just because he could.

...Do you call him Mr. Savage, by any chance?

This troper's high school Chem teacher started the very first class off with an explosive demonstration, and then did the lighting hydrogen as our first experiment. He was also fond of telling us how big the explosion would be when we get hit by an earthquake (although that wasn't unjustified, as due to several school closures and new regulations, we had FOUR schools worth of all the dangerous chemicals.)

At least you didn't have any crystallizing picric acid lurking in the back shelves... the bomb squad had to be called in.

This troper's high school Chem teacher started the year off by lighting his desk on fire.

This troper's teacher did the same. He then proceeded to light some steel wool on fire and threw it in the air when it lit too soon, almost hitting this troper.

Same with this troper. Except there is ''radioactive material'' in our storage room. We periodically measure it with a Geiger counter. Mostly after a lab somehow involved blowing up soap.

This troper too, then he set his hand on fire. The best part was, that was nowhere near the coolest thing that teacher did.

This troper's high school Chem lab had very old bunsen burners. We were required to light the match, and then turn on the burners. I had a pair of crazy friends who decided to do it the other way around, and then couldn't light the match...

This troper's college suffered a lab accident in the Chem building. While no details were ever divulged, apparently, while the lab room was left generally intact, the blast was still powerful enough to ''knock out the power grid to the entire school campus''.

This troper had a teacher in high school who would start off his physical science, physics, and chemistry classes each year with a cute little potassium explosion. Sadly, this troper wasn't in the class where the potassium he'd prepared spontaneously combusted as the oil it had been stored in dripped off. She heard it was funny. This troper also had a college Chem professor who is "no longer allowed" to teach the lab sections for his basic chemistry class, for obvious explodey reasons.

Speaking of oil dripping off elements, the then-Head of Science at this troper's old school discovered, amid preparations for moving to a new building, several jars of potassium and sodium, about fifty years old and really low on oil, at the back of a cupboard. After screaming slightly, she called the bomb squad, who spent the rest of the day disposing of it all in the pond. The gardener is still pissed about his lilies, but the bomb guys apparently appreciated the entertainment.

This troper's mother once told her about a classmate who lighted a match near an open tap that dispensed ''pure oxygen''. Miraculously, no one got hurt, even though half the classroom was ruined.

Somewhere between Truth In Television and Film, this troper once made a short movie in which a disastrous high school chemistry experiment triggered the chain of events making up the plot.When asking the chem teacher if she could borrow the lab to film the scene, he eagerly offered up a few chemicals that really would produce a small explosion. This troper declined, having come up with a much more effective way to imply an explosion. (A fast dip to white and the sound of breaking glass. Works wonders.)

This filmmaker troper applauds the above troper's skillful creativity, but decries her abhorrent lack of joy at filming BADA BOOM. ''Free'' BADA BOOM. Couldn't you have used both effects?

Clearly this trope is TruthInTelevision, everybody who's ever been in science class has had one of these stories. One of the more memorable high school shenanigans was when some guys managed to set alight the gas duct that they were meant to plug the bunsen burner into. The result was a flame that went all the way to the ceiling before the teacher hit the emergency shut-off valve.

This troper had a classmate who managed to kill the power to that wing of the school by "accidentally, I swear" spilling concentrated hydrochloric acid on the electrical outlets set into the desks. This resulted in sparks flying out of said outlets at roughly groin level, which worried said male classmate very much. The smell was something out of a children's gross-out-entertainment show, the outlets were boarded over the next day, and the kid never lived it down.

This troper had a college lab teacher who decided to show us just how powerful the chemicals we were using to clean glassware were...by putting a drop of said chemical on a thick plate of stainless steel, and having us watch as said chemical ''ate through almost half an inch of steel''. Not quite explodey, but same principle.

This troper's uncle once pitched a brick of sodium into the Charles River, apparently just for the hell of it. The resulting explosion could be heard in Quincy. Bored drunk MIT undergrads are so fun.

This troper is given to understand that a professor, with several chem students, did much the same thing several years back with a large quantity of sodium in the Mississippi River, without alcohol. The resultant spray reportedly struck the 70-foot clearance bridge, though that is likely an exaggeration. There is also another professor who is no longer allowed near the department's Tesla coil, for presumably similar, if less outright explosive reasons.

This troper's mother had a classmate who intentionally pitched a chunk of sodium down the chemistry lab sink as a prank. The classmate survived; the sink did not.

This troper will see your 'drunk MIT undergrad with sodium' and raise you a sober MIT undergrad group with dynamite.

This troper has had several instructors do demos involving glowing, fizzling, and occasionally exploding chemicals, including the obligatory "alkali metals in water" demos.

This troper obviously went to an extremely boring high school, as neither his nor any of his classmates' chemistry teachers ever blew anything up or set anything on fire to the best of his recollection.

Variant: This troper went to a high school for the sort of students who shouldn't be allowed near fire. We never were.

This troper's chem teacher gave the usual wear-your-goggles spiel at the beginning of the year. Near the end of the year he gave a sometimes-goggles-can't-save-you spiel accompanied by exposing a set of goggles to a large beaker of pyrotechnic materials. Shortly thereafter we had a wrecked beaker and a puddle of plastic.

This troper's chem teacher was able to somehow ''subvert'' this trope, with education through ''lack'' of pyrotechnics. She half-filled a tennis ball-can with explosive gas, and set off the striker. Explosion. She then asked the class if they wanted her to add twice the gas. Very vocal approval. Striker goes. No oxygen, no explosion. Lesson on combustion complete.

This troper's chem teacher usually didn't do pyrotechnics, although she did show us some very cool chemical reactions. Except that time when she had the class build a rocket by extracting hydrogen from water, storing it in a plastic bottle and lighting it up. And the time when she placed a small piece of sodium into a bowl of water. Also, apparently some student had once accidentally dropped a piece of sodium down the drain, causing serious damage to the school's plumbings.

This troper's biology teacher once demonstrated digestion by setting fire to some Cheetos -- relatively mild as educational pyrotechnics go, but it seemed gratuitous compared to his usually rather plain lectures.

This troper's mother still has impressive scars on her arms from an accident in a chem class. She didn't have a sense of smell, and so picked up the wrong chemical for a reaction. She punched a hole through foot thick steel reinforced concrete, and melted much of the sink.

This troper had a chemistry teacher who did much of the above--in addition to setting hydrogen on fire, turning a large 5-gallon bottle into a mini-rocket, and creating a huge puddle of green flames in the middle of a lab table (all the while spewing rainbow-colored fireballs from a Bunsen burner), he blew methane-filled soap bubbles, and popped them with a flame-on-a-stick. By adjusting the levels of methane, he showed up how he could make them go up in pretty fireballs or explode with violent force. One of this troper's favorites of his experiments didn't really go *fwoom*, but it did go *BANG!* -- the combination of dry ice and sealed containers to create fantastically loud explosions.

A more recent, college chem teacher of this troper's was fairly tame, but she ''did'' decide to set off some thermite for us once. While this troper knew all about thermite from the {{Mythbusters}}, she didn't know (and nor did the professor warn us) just how very ''bright'' the stuff was when it went up. Even though this troper looked away in less than a second, she was seeing a flame-shaped spot in her eyes for a good fifteen minutes afterward.

This troper learned how to make things explode for no reason other than "It looks cool" and "the director wants it" in her final year of Production in theatre school. Guns! Pyro! Exploding fake hearts that gush blood! AWESOME!

Oh hell yes. This troper was GOOD at that stuff. According to her mother, a little ''too'' good. (Troper still isn't sure what her complaint was - the homemade firecrackers were a massive hit with the neighborhood kids...)

This troper's high school chemistry teacher has yet to cause any actual explosions, but he has caused one fire drill per year so far. I'm hoping my senior year is a grand finale.

This troper didn't witness it himself, but heard that one particular science teacher at his high school often started his grade 9 science class each semester by ''setting his desk on fire''. He then put it out with a fire extinguisher or some such, but that's not the point. Not sure what point this proved, but no one complained.

This troper accidentally unscrewed the bottom out of a lit bunsen burner. FWOOM. On the bright side, my eyebrows have grown back, more luxuriant than ever!

Proof that this doesn't always happen in a lab, or on purpose: During a Boy Scout camping trip, our fire safety counsellor was explaining to us about root fires and the like. Somehow, this troper can't remember because this was about 12 years ago, the roots of the lone tree in the clearing caught, and nothing happened... until a giant flame exploded out THE TOP OF THE TREE. Ka-Boom indeed.

This troper was on a Boy Scout camping trip when someone somehow got camp stove fuel all over his hand and didn't realize it until it caught fire! Luckily for him, the fuel has such a low flashpoint that he wasn't burned at all and the fire exhausted itself before he even had time to put it out himself.

This troper's High School chemistry teacher set off the fire alarm at least 10 times a year. Until they replaced the smoke detectors with infrared detectors, at great cost. What set all this off? Well, the first day of class, the students would set themselves on fire. Ok, so maybe not themselves, but rather hydrogen bubbles on their skin, but still. Oh, and "self-carving" pumpkins for Halloween.

This troper has another acid-related tale. My biology professor went to college with a guy with spilled hydrochloric acid on his crotch. His jeans melted, but after being shoved in to the emergency shower, he was just fine.

To the best of this troper's knowledge, this Darwin Awards personal account was not written by her chemistry teacher. But he did once blow a fist-sized hole in the desk doing precisely that experiment. He has also been known to use unwisely large chunks of potassium in alkali-metal-water demonstrations, and once helpfully demonstrated to his class how ''not'' to put out a chip pan fire. There is still a scorch mark on the ceiling.

Almost an explosion, but not quite: In college electronics lab, the professor was very adamant about making sure people read the directions fully before starting, and always put their capacitors in the right alignment (Those who've taken these classes know where this is going). One day in lab, we head a loud 'BANG!' followed by 'CRACK' and 'SPARK'. The professor leaps across the room, unplugs a computer monitor (which now has a thumb-sized hole in it), and then leaps just as quickly to the lab bench where two students were sitting, laughing. "Gentlemen, remember how I said capacitors were not toys and should never be played with? You both just failed this course. Get out." The people sitting on either side of the destroyed monitor cheered, since a foot in either direction would've meant their ''heads''.

Similar incident in this troper's GCSE electronics class. Making something, can't remember exactly what, but there was a sudden, loud bang and somebody screamed. They'd wired up a capacitor the wrong way round and it exploded. Although, my electronics teacher is a mad person and deliberately reverse-biased and blew up a diode and another capacitor on separate occasions. There's still a burn mark on the desk from the diode.

This happened in a class that I took. A guy decided to connect an ammeter DIRECTLY to the outputs of a transformer.\\ If you know how ammeters work, you already know where this will end... If you don't: ammeters have a very small resistance (so all the current will pass through them), effectively you are shorting the power supply. Now join that with a 30V power supply and... this trope ensues.

This troper's high-school anatomy teacher gained a decent amount of fame in her school for accidentally setting her own hair on fire during a laboratory safety demonstration. Thinking quickly (and never one to miss an opportunity for education), she dunked her head in the sink, turned back to the class and said words to the effect of "And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how NOT to operate a Bunsen burner."

Today this troper's Physics teacher blew up a pumpkin. He said it was to demonstrate Newton's laws.

This troper's GSA in his freshman chem class should have learned these two rules: 1.) Make sure students know to never mix chemicals unless the lab instructs you to do so. 2.) Make sure that students know that today's lab has chemicals that shouldn't be mixed. The guy working at the station across from me broke his beakers with a burst of purple smoke that day.

Last week this troper's beginning chemistry teacher proved that hydrogen bubbles + fire = FUN. It was part of her lecture about reactions. This troper was one of the brave few to try it.

Once, in high school, this troper and his lab partner were performing a relatively simple experiment, the goal of which was to determine how much hydrogen was produced by a reaction. Our method? Collect the products and ''explode them''. It didn't produce a very quantitative result, but it was effective enough.

And although this particular anecdote isn't explosion-related, it is chemistry-related: troper and his friends, while in grade 11, spent the better part of a semester fermenting iced tea in a locker. When our chemistry teacher found out, he gave us a few tips and let us test the alcohol content in the lab.

This troper. A very large container. Two parts pure hydrogen. One part pure oxygen. A very long lit splint. Result: A very loud bang, all the windows in the building blowing out, a small amount of water in the split container.

This Troper's Physics teacher did a demonstration with "flash paper" at a Parent Teacher night. Long story short, he probably shouldn't have assumed the second piece he accidentally picked up wasn't going to have much of an effect.

This Troper's father had a very dangerous situation happen when he was in high school. A fellow student in his chem class accidentally screwed up an experiment. How? Let's just say that mixing glycerin and nitric acid is a VERY bad idea. They had to evacuate the school, bring in the police and fire department, and the principal chucked the vial into a nearby field. Snow went up like a hurricane (it was winter at the time).

There was another thing the same Troper's father knew about. A guy in the high school's electronics repair class ended up crossing some wires he wasn't supposed to and blew up the TV, shooting himself across the room!

This troper's father once got a hold of part of a brick of potassium. Lets just say that he and his pants learned a very valuable lesson about not letting alkali metals contact water (he was uninjured).

This Troper was one half of a blackpowder demonstration to assembled teachers prior to a teacher/parent meeting. The 'raise dramatically from behind the desk in a gasmask and labcoat' part. The experiment worked. The meeting had to be moved to another classroom.

Happened, strangely enough, in this troper's foods class. In the next kitchen over, someone spilled a bag of flour over the burner. Explosion.

In this troper's school, a (now retired) teacher set a student's lab notebook on fire with a parabolic mirror once a year.

Environmental Systems teachers should never try to be chemistry teachers. I believe the burn marks are still on the desks.

This troper's lab partner placed a red hot crucible on this troper's instruction sheet for the lab. Predictably, the instruction sheet and several paper towels caught fire.

Said troper also had a friend who blew up a test tube containing copper and sulfur. This was in ''8th grade''.

This Troper had a middle-school teacher who sparked our interest on the first day by soaking his hand in a water-and-alcohol solution and setting it on fire. He used the right mix, so it didn't burn him.

This troper had this quirky '''physics''' teacher who finished his lab class early once, and snuck a coil of magnesium out from the storeroom (we had some shared-use storerooms and labs in my secondary school) for the sole purpose of lighting it on fire to entertain us. And probably himself as well, judging by his expression at that time.

This Anon had a friend who was a... sort of emotionless pyro psycho. He would spend chemistry or physics practicals covertly stuffing bunsen burners full of wooden splints, and while I can't remember if he ever actually blew anything up, he sure tried with the materials available. Also, one of our teachers once demonstrated what I think was the thermite reaction and gassed the room.

This Troper experienced a narrow aversion in his sophomore year of high school. The school had no heating that winter, so the chemistry teacher lit the Bunsen burners to warm up the room. Cue the room getting quite toasty from the 30 lit burners in the back. Some moron in Troper's class decided that it would cool the room down if he blew some of them out. Not turned off, ''blew out'', leaving the ''gas '''running'''''. The chem teacher flipped seven kinds of shit on the kid, because the gas had built up to such a level after fifteen minutes that he could have blown up ''the entire science wing''.

TwoWords: [=MRE=] Bombs. Hurray for Drill Sergeant [[RuleOfCool Awesome! Why yes, they ''do'' teach more than the Book.

This Anon has a teacher who has done thermite as a demo, lit a gas tap to create a foot long jet of flame, got students at an open eventing to create a 'Human Chain of Fire' with methane bubbles on their hands(I now have no hair anywhere near my hands) and the teacher could make things go boom if he was left in a kitchen for a few hours. The school is intact, for now...

An idiot in this troper's class wanted to see what would happen if one stuck a flame in vodka... after illegally bringing the vodka to ''high school'' and then ''pouring it on himself''. His screams of pain alerted the rest of us that he wasn't just break dancing in the middle of class. That, and the pale blue flames we saw after our teacher so cleverly flipped the light switch off so we could see the pale blue flames lighting up the front of his jeans. Said idiot then became a minor legend at our school. Oh, and they put the fire out. Eventually.

This troper had always much fun with magnesium, throwing it into a fire and such. One day, while doing it, some of the magnesium stuck to his thumb and catched fire. Lesson learned? Magnesium burns damn hot and hurts even more. He diddn't play with it since then..

One of my friends was telling a story about his high school physics class. They had two really big van de Graff generators, and the experiment du jour was to set them at different distances from each other and see how much charge they needed to get a spark to jump between them. Unfortunately, there was only one place in the classroom large enough to set up two really big van de Graff generators, in front of the door. You guessed it, a kid came in the room late, and Paramedics Ensued. (No permanent injury, but he was knocked out.)

At this troper's college, there was a standard (and surely non-unique) joke about our science building: "Why is Chemistry on the top floor?" "So that when they blow the place up everyone else can keep working." This is the same place they "sweep the floors" by throwing the used liquid nitrogen and/or dry ice down the halls (and it works!), so yeah.

There's truth to this. The most dangerous labs in a building are always on top, mostly for ease of ventilation, but also to limit the damage from explosions, since the force is mostly directed upwards.

This troper's high school chemistry teacher once performed a demonstration with the aforementioned thermite -- a mixture of ferric oxide and powdered aluminum that burns at approximately 4,500° Fahrenheit. While he warned the class against standing anywhere within 15 feet of the reaction, he neglected to warn us about the dangers of looking directly at a burning magnesium flare, which was used to ignite the thermite. Of course, the resulting pyrotechnics made this by far the most enjoyable demonstration of the year.

Where to start? Well our chemistry teacher had a 5 gallon water jug (the kind you find on water coolers) that he would put a little bit of ethyl alcohol. After it had evaporated, he would drop a match in it. This would produce a nice little flame jetting out of the jug and a loud noise. Useful for waking up a napping student. Then there was the time the lab aide (honor's class kid who had nothing better to do that period) was working on something involving steel wool and an electrical source. Well he lit the steel wool on fire. He panics and throws it into the garbage lighting the garbage can on fire. Out teacher calmly grabs the fire extinguisher and puts the fire out.

My physics teacher, before I had him, tried the water cooler jug experiment and apparently got the ratio just right and caused the jug to EXPLODE, sending shrapnel all over the science wing and possibly causing the loudest sound ever heard at my high school

Once upon a time we were having a science lesson on fire. So our teacher sets up a tripod, a bunsen burner, a small can of oil and everything else he needs to start a chip pan fire. After pouring water on it a few times the teacher put a damp towel on the fire to show us the proper way to extuinguish a chip pan fire. The towel then proceeded to burst into flames resulting in our teacher throwing the, still burning, towel in the sink and putting it out. Our teacher then told us to "Never tell anyone that happened"

In addition to the hydrogen bubbles, burning steel wool, and small bits of sodium in water (large chunks of sodium were relegated to a nonetheless-entertaining video), this troper's high school chem teacher would go all-out every Halloween: dressing up as TheGrimReaper, leaving the lights off, and filling the lab with blacklights and smoking Erlenmeyer flasks. The highlight of the period, when it worked, was the slow-burn red flame in the pumpkin. No wimpy candle for this Jack-o-lantern, no sir!

This troper's chemistry class had every single one of the school's pyromaniacs in it- including the teacher. Not to mention his best friend was banned from taking chemistry following an explosion of some copper sulfide that blew out a window and loged glass in some brick columns.

On the first day of Chemistry class, This Troper had a old-looking man with lazy eye that both looked and sounded like the typical "really boring professor". However, he quickly won the crowd the first day after basically saying "I know you're going to be expecting lots of explosions, so let's get it over with" and made a pretty damn good one.

This troper's high school chemistry teacher would light student's homework on fire before marking it if it wasn't written in blue or black ink.

One time a classmate of mine thought it would be a good idea to take the temperature of a Bunsen burner flame. So she stuck a thermometer into the flame, and had planned to hold it there until the little red line stopped moving. She never found out what the temperature was because the thermometer exploded first.

This troper's dad once cleaned a table with ammonia, and then thought it wasn't clean enough so he cleaned it again with bleach. They had to evacuate his entire dorm building.

This Troper has seen hydrogen-filled exploding balloons, strangely-colored flames (due to the properties of each burning substance,) what seemed to be aluminum foil disintegrating into an aqueous solution as if it were in one of those stereotypical pools of acid (it was really a reaction in which aluminum and another substance switched places,) and more in his Chemistry class. Despite that, he did not enjoy that class.

This troper used to have a Chemistry teacher who was essentially phoning it in and enjoyed showing videos that, if we were very lucky, were loosely related. But since he let us see the same video on explosions five times, I'm not complaining.

This troper's ninth grade science teacher did an experiment that had a higher reaction than he expected. Whatever it was (that has slipped my mind) ended up on the ceiling, and made a huge pink splash visible. This troper's senior year that classroom STILL had a splash on the wall.

Relatedly, he had asked for assistance with another experiment, and as he was nearing the reaction he glanced around nervously and suggested the first few rows might want to move to the back. Cue the boy who was helping's panicked reaction-"It's okay for ME to be up here?!"

This troper's chem professor in college was illustrating different properties and reactions associated with common periodic elements. Nitrogen just happens to form a large number of really, ''really'' reactive compounds with anything. One particular demonstration involved ''contact explosives.'' The professor walked in with a set-up that consisted of three ring stands stacked on top of each other, and on each tier was a piece of paper with a small bit of some purple substance (nitrogen triiodide, if I recall correctly). He then puts on his safety goggles and states that he hopes all the samples go off because he can't risk moving the structure after it's set up. Then he picked up a six-foot pole with a piece of paper tied to the end of it, ''brushes'' the sample on the lowest tier, and the resulting explosion triggered the two samples ''above it'' to blow up.

Bunsen burners + teenage boys = good times. Ah, the good days.

This troper's friend's father is a high school science teacher, and once recounted an incident at a school he used to teach at. Some student had stolen a brick of an alkalai metal (either sodium or potassium; this troper forgets). The same student had the bright idea to dampen a couple paper towels and stick them over the brick to hide it, then put it in his locker. After the water soaked through the paper towels, he came out of his next class to discover that, among other havoc, his locker had no door, and directly across the locker bay was a large dent in the wall and a heap of metal that presumably used to be his locker door.

This troper's science extention class was full of these. This includes the time where it was separated into two teams, each charged with creating a projectile weapon. The science teacher helped the other team use HYDROGEN as the explosive needed to launch the tennis ball, and it ended up destroying thier gun's chassis, setting the ball on fire and almost taking out This Troper's eye...

This can even occur outside the sciences. A teacher of this troper's acquaintance used to burn Joan of Arc in effigy each year for the benefit of his World History class. The janitors finally convinced him to cut it out, as they were sick of replacing that bit of the floor.

There is ''absolutely'' no truth to the rumours that This Troper once managed to blow up a fume cupboard at his college. Or that, as the fragments of glass and plastic settled, his teacher approached, put one hand on his shoulder and said, "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!". Practical lessons were the only part of that chem class this troper actually passed.

This troper's grandfather had a Masters in Chemistry before getting an M.D. One of the chem textbooks passed down through dear old dad was an ancient industrial chem textbook that had a cartoon glued into the inside cover. Two guys walking past a building that had part of the second floor wall exploding outward. One guy says to the other, "There goes [name scratched out] flunking chemistry again." So this trope is pretty old.

This troper's high school employed a man who taught both freshman-level general science and junior-level chemistry. He made it a point to wrap up each and every school year with a week straight of just blowing stuff up, including the famous elemental-sodium-in-water trick. He also always took one day out of the year to play with liquid nitrogen in every one of his classes, regardless of how irrelevant it was to the current topic of study, and this invariably involved (among other things) putting some of the substance in a two-liter bottle with the lid on as tight as possible, causing the bottle to explode from the building pressure as the nitrogen boiled. It was not uncommon to feel the floor shake in classrooms directly above this teacher's.

There were two examples at this troper's high school: First, her Physics instructor taught the class about hydraulics by having us build mini-rockets made of 2L soda bottles and propelled by pressurized water. Second, her Agriculture teacher demonstrated just how wine making can go wrong when he showed us a plastic bottle of something that was supposed to be banana wine but had been fermenting too long. It exploded because of internal air pressure and blew off the top half of the bottle.

This troper's chemistry teacher once overcalculated the amount of chemicals needed for an experiment and caused the test tube to shatter. This troper cannot remember the exact nature of the experiment though.

Not strictly chemistry, but it happens in electromagnetism in Da_Nuke's college. The ''best'' power source you can use when demonstrating magnetic fields is a car battery. Why? Because it sparks!

One of the chemistry teachers at this troper's school managed to set his classroom on fire last year WHILE FILMING A FIRE SAFETY VIDEO.

This troper's sister learned about relative density of gasses by blowing up bubbles. You know those nozzles you hook Bunsen burners up to? Yeah, use those to blow bubbles with bubble solution and a wand, let the bubble float to the ceiling, and then poke it with a lit fireplace matchstick. They never did replace the ceiling tiles...

This Troper's seventh-grade teacher was about as close to this as you could get in a public school who are very self-conscious of safety regulations. This Troper forgets the details, but somehow he got some sort of gas inside a water bottle that would make it explode, and lobbed the explosive water bottles outside the window so that the class could watch them explode in safety... Some nearby pedestrian called the police because she heard that a bomb went off!

This troper's Chem teacher subverts this trope, but enjoys {{Lampshading}} that this troper and one of his friends should never touch the Bunsen Burners as the two of them are dangerous pyromaniacs. Just like her mentor and the head lab assistant. They once used the chemicals in the lab to form ammonium nitrate. Which, in a demonstration for this troper's Chem teacher and her class, they lit. This incident thus inspired the school into making a new scenario for the fire drills.

This Troper received the following e-mail while at university. He is ''still'' curious. #QUOTE#To: [the entire biology, chemistry, physics, and pharmacology departments]\\ From: [Professor]\\ Subject: The Chemistry of Fireworks\\ Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 09:07:27 +0000\\ \\ I would like to apologise to all those people who attended The Chemistry of Fireworks lecture yesterday. I take full responsibility for the inconvenience caused, and hope things can return to normal in two weeks' time, with [Staff Member]'s lecture on forensic chemistry, which definitely will not contain any flashes or bangs.\\ \\ Once again, many apologies.\\ \\ [Professor]

This Troper's high school physics teacher also doubled as basic chemistry.

Would fill a hanging bell jar with hydrogen while lecturing with hydrogen in his lungs. Then light the top.

Later a kid would passs out because he thought it was a good idea to breathe the H2 and then run down the hallway.

Filled 2L soda bottles with water and dry ice. These were promptly thrown out the third story window to go off next to the acient secretaries office.

Took 4 soup can, cut out one end, cut out half the other end, welded them together so the half cut out ends alternate, poke small hole in last can, jam raquetball in open end, pour grain alchol into small hole, lecture for 20 minutes will spinning the cannon. Light the end. The janitor finally just put the repalcement ceiling tiles in his room with a ladder.

Rigged a chair in the classroom to an electrical source and zapped the kids who sat there.

Setup a door bell to go off should anyone come to class late.

Had a surgical tubing sling shot which worked well from the thrid floor.

Durning a demonstration with a Van Degraf generator allow the kids to stand on a wooden chair and place their hands on it. One of them decided it would be a good idea to stick a metal rod to the zipper on anothers pants with the predictable results.

Lectured on resonance frequency by talking about sex with his wife on a mattress.

Our entry-level science teacher's first lesson involved setting something on fire, with a bang.

All of This Troper's High School science teachers were quite happy to blow things up when appropriate (and a couple were quite happy to do so at other times!). (3rd-person mode off) Also, from Year 8 onwards, I performed various explosive demonstrations on the school 'Open Day' (for prospective students) including the 'make water in a Pringles can with hydrogen and a loud bang' one. I got quite a reputation as a mad scientist (rightly so!). Even so, this is nothing compared to one of the many crazy stories my college Physics teacher told us: apparently one of his friends at university was working with some chemicals in a fume cupboard, unaware that it was faulty and had not cycled out the hydrogen from a previous experiment. A flame was involved in the unlucky sod's experiment. The side of the university building was blown out.

Once, while this troper's class was doing an experiment, the Chemistry teacher pulled out several containers of chemicals and a thermos of liquid nitrogen. By some way or another, he made a few grams of TATP by the end of the lesson and demonstrated its power by using a pendulum, a hammer, and quite a lot of duct tape to detonate it. He refused to tell the class how. He replicated the effects in the next lesson with 1.5 liter bottles, a thermos of dry ice and a thermos of hot water. The best incident occurred on April Fools' as this troper's class was the first lesson, and last year's "winner" had parked his car under the Chem lab. In a subversion, the Chemistry teacher had soaked a few loaves of bread in water overnight and threw it onto the car.

One of this troper's friends once had a chemistry lesson where their teacher was trying to create a particular reaction by combining 3 or so chemicals in a particular order. If they got the order wrong, the mixture would explode; unfortunately the teacher had lost the paper with the correct order on it, so she tried the various different combos behind a blast shield to find out. Nothing happened, so she takes down the blast shield and puts them all to work, with one of the mixtures in front of my friend's desk. After a while, the mixture near his desk overflowed, before melting a hole in his chemistry textbook and getting a fair way through the table underneath it. Also, this troper's own chemistry teacher (who had an odd sense of humour) decided to find out what would happen if you put a blow-torch to a cream egg; the chocolate went black and carbonised, while the cream stuff inside it started to bubble suspiciously if anyone was interested.

For those who went to my high school and were in the Introductory Physical Science class, this was a mainstay. Our teacher, every year, would show us this experiment that involved soap bubbles, the gas from the bunsen burners, and fire. It was called the Bubble Bomb and all these years later, I can't remember what it was supposed to be teaching us, but I do remember it was AWESOME! (You could actually observe from year to year the scorch marks on the ceiling getting bigger from this experiment.) I also went to a college where the science club every year would throw its event of "blowing up" the lake the school owns to raise money for the club - this involved a smaller amount of sodium than was mentioned in the MIT example above (I think) but same principle!

One of the science teachers at this troper's school is infamous for this. For reference, after moving to a brand new science block, his classroom had scorch marks on the ''ceiling'' within the first ''week''.

This Tropette's super-cool grade nine science teacher found this the best way to get the less than enthusiastic students into the lesson. He once dropped potassium into a bucket of water.

I have had two explosive moments so far in my classes. The first one was when a friend of mine broken his crucible after heating it to much. It exploded but the best part was when he tried to sweep it into the plastic trash can and melted through the bottom. The second time was with my brand new physics teacher. He decided to teach us how to make match rockets, even kindly reminding us how not to make grenades by mistake. When we went outside to test them mine (accidentally I promise) shot backward toward him and exploded.

During an electronics class, this troper was assured by the persona assembling the circuit that the capacitor was properly inserted. It was in fact reversed and proceeded to go off like a party favor. A pair of eyeglasses saved this troper from potentially losing an eye.