Physics, Fish and Fire
Our secondary school physics lesson were always held in a portacabin in the school grounds. Me and my schoolmates sat on a desk at the back, which never helped me much because of my shortsightedness.

Anyhows, at the back of the classroom was a fishtank with the ugliest muthafukkin fish we'd ever seen, going by the name of Oscar. Now, oscar had one party trick, which to be honest, probably accounted for the fact that the pupils had let him live so long - if you held your fingers near the surface of the water, he'd circle a few times then jump up and snap at your fingers with his gummy little mouth.

Now, Oscar was also a nervous little chap (who wouldn't be in his position?) and jumped around freakishly whenever there was a bang. Of course, first lessons of the day always involved taking your chairs down off of the tables (we used to have to put them up there after last lessons so the cleaners could blitz the room fast enough to leave before they'd even turned up for work!). So cue us trying to give him a fishy heart attack by slamming our chairs down at the beginning of first lessons!

However, fish aside, physics was fairly boring except for one lesson where we had to measure how rapidly water cooled and plot a graph. In order to heat up the water, and being in a portacabin without a gas supply, we got spirit burners, tripods and beakers - pretty standard issue.

Well, we decided we should conduct experiments with the spirit from the spirit burners, and poured that into the beaker. First was the "dip your fingers in, set them alight and see how long you can last before blowing the flames out" experiment. That went quite well, and if I remember correctly the lad won who did a Freddy Kreuger impersonation whilst doing it.

Next was the "how melted can you make a biro by dipping it in and setting it alight?". Well, the answer is - quite melted, until the plastic ignites and gives off acrid black smoke.

Running out of ideas, one of the lads decided to test how long the spirit flames would burn for before igniting my text book, and promptly splashed some over my book and set it alight. Interesting experiment, as I managed to bash out the flames before my book set alight.

Lastly, he extended the same experiment to the entire desk, complete with textbooks, pencil cases and equipment. To add to the effect, his impersonation of Satan laughing whilst the flames lept up was quite good.

Conclusion? All of the above experiments were carried out without the teacher even knowing what was going on at the back of the class and were most educational.

Side-note: Oscar was unimpressed with my protractor and eraser that got threw in his tank. At least I managed to get my pencil case before it sank next to his little plastic castle.
( brown-wings Made with three kinds of butter, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 16:05, 2 replies)

*
thrown.

/pedant.
(berk, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 16:10, closed)

I awwwww'd at "fishy heart attack".
Poor Oscar :(
(whirleygig, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 20:30, closed)