Frazz by Jef Mallett for December 14, 2018

How can you study when the table’s on fire?

Or when the fire department is dragging hoses all over the place and telling people to get out already.

Is this going to be like Calvin’s “noodle incident”?

My dad was a machinist, and made a part from magnesium. A co-worker took home a handful of the shavings to show his family. He put them on a cookie sheet on the living room floor, and lit them. After they burned thru the cookie sheet, they burned thru the floor.

Some tales never fade. Those parents who attended school with Frazz will keep that story alive through the generations. After all, it is too good to let die.

She said “an ambience”. She didn’t say WHAT ambience. It would certainly focus one’s attention.

I was under the impression that this was a “grade school”, now I learn that there are grade 11 students. It would be interesting to see how Frazz might interact with a surly teenager.

I was a less advanced student. I didn’t blow up MY chem lab until I was in college. Yes, magnesium was involved.

8th grade Science class with either phosphorus or magnesium- fire column rose up to the ceiling. Best class EVER.

did you know if you are a really smart kid you can do a science fair project on the distillation of alcohol all the way to ether? And. Did you know if you are not so bright a chemistry teacher you can take a big wiff of said ether? And you fall down.

I’ve got a great story about a chance of magnesium and TSA. But it would take too long.

She should just move to California. If you like roaring fires, there’s no place better.

Frazz12 hrs ·

There was a restaurant in the area a few years ago that had an especially interesting dessert option: ice cream made tableside. Not just served tableside. Made there. Using liquid nitrogen. It was spectacular, and as I recall, the ice cream tasted pretty good, too. But it disappeared from the menu, not because people weren’t buying it, but because, I heard, the liquid nitrogen was way too much fun to play with for the rest of the employees, and the stuff had a way of disappearing much faster than ice cream sales would warrant. And God knows what was disappearing fast because it was so fun to instantly freeze.

I’m no restaurant expert, any more than I’m a chemistry expert, but I did go to high school. And so I can’t imagine things would be any less spectacular, or any more successful, if a restaurant tried to offer something cooked tableside with burning magnesium. Nor how many random pieces of restaurant property would be destroyed trying to smother the fire. Don’t ask me why I’m so sure of this, and if you do, I’ll insist it’s something I saw and nothing I did.

I think that most classes are better if the students are learning something about a real world job that they have right now. Apprenticeships come immediately to mind, but learning to make change in 2nd grade is retained better if you have a lemonade stand where you need to practice it…

In like manner, an exciting chemistry accident might be a great goad to learning more chemistry.

At least it wasn’t the sulfuric acid/iron filings experiment. One day per semester my 9th grade science teacher would stink up the building, every period.

Kinda reminds me of about Alice Gordonson in Anatomy class. The things should could do with a hand and some tendons…. She went on to specialize in hand surgery.