Did anyone here have such an enlightening high school science class?

[ctdonath]

ammonium hydroxide with iodine crystals

Ah, Mr. Estes' chemistry class.

He'd give the smart kids hints about what to research, and didn't react (save the big grin) when the more ... interesting ... experiments were tried. The stockroom was the most amazing place on earth to a young smart teen.
Nitrogen tri-iodide.
Hydrogen + oxygen ... lots of it.
Figuring out which boxes of yellow powder were radioactive via photgraphic paper.
Finishing labs fast so we could scour textbooks for the secrets of exothermic reactions.

He DID keep the sodium out of reach.

[crt360]

My HS science classes were pretty boring.  Biology - we cut up some dead stuff.  Chemistry - I had a lab partner that was obsessed with our burner and spent a lot of time melting and reshaping various glass items.  He also spent a lot of time in detention.  I blew up my long lab project.  Unfortunately, an exploding test tube of brown matter was not the desired result and my grade for several weeks of hard work suffered.

Some guys I knew in another class managed to make sodium cyanide gas which resulted in their respiratory arrest and basic deathlike state until paramedics showed up and revived them.

Physics was a little better, but still didn't measure up to poisonous snakes or Irwin's "It Happened to Me!" vicious black bear attack.

[280plus]

I have the cookbook on CD. I didn't see anything that really tripped my trigger. Kind of lame was what I was thinking.

Thanks Mike, I'll keep that in mind if I ever feed a bear cub. Bottle yes, finger no! 

[K Frame]

I wish it hadn't happened to me.

My finger hurt for three weeks. For the first week I couldn't do anything with it. Typing class was a NIGHTMARE.

[Perd Hapley]

My high school chem teacher was an incredibly boring fellow named Joe Walsh.  According to the scuttlebutt, he was retired from Dow, and had a gazillion patents. 

He didn't mind telling kids how to make bombs, if they asked.  He showed my friend Eddie all this stuff about how to make atomic bombs. 

One night, someone's mail-box got blown up with one of those Draino + aluminum bombs.  Mr. Walsh was canned. 

[grislyatoms]

All we really did was burn magnesium. Teacher rinsed out the crucible, then looked at the resulting milky white liquid with a puzzled expression. "Milk of Magnesia?"

Pretty cool, but boring class altogether.

Oh, yeah and we played with mercury a little too. He had a quart or so of it, pretty cool to float an iron bar on it.

"we played with mercury a little too" might explain a few things...

[Manedwolf]

College was more interesting with chemistry.

Someone did the dyslexia thing and added water to acid, destroyed an entire bench.

[280plus]

I wish it hadn't happened to me.

My finger hurt for three weeks. For the first week I couldn't do anything with it. Typing class was a NIGHTMARE.

yea, but the coolness factor of being able to say you were bitten by a bear should more than make up for it. 

[Manedwolf]

yea, but the coolness factor of being able to say you were bitten by a bear should more than make up for it. 

No, no...if YOU bite the bear, then you can have the badass cred.

[DustinD]

http://www.roguesci.org/ has a lot of great information about chemistry, explosives, and the sorts of things that the Anarchist Cookbook touches on. I have the original book, and it is seriously not worth reading except maybe to get an idea of what was going through the minds of some people several decades ago.

Rogue Science has a nice chemical lab section and forum, but be careful because they have very strict moderation policies and the people there are not very tolerant of almost anyone. The quality of the information though is as good as anyone could ever hope for.

I have been meaning to get some stuff from their FTP site for a while now. They also have almost any information ever published about anything explosive if you look hard enough through their forum.

[Viking]

http://www.roguesci.org/ has a lot of great information about chemistry, explosives, and the sorts of things that the Anarchist Cookbook touches on. I have the original book, and it is seriously not worth reading except maybe to get an idea of what was going through the minds of some people several decades ago.

Rogue Science has a nice chemical lab section and forum, but be careful because they have very strict moderation policies and the people there are not very tolerant of almost anyone. The quality of the information though is as good as anyone could ever hope for.

I have been meaning to get some stuff from their FTP site for a while now. They also have almost any information ever published about anything explosive if you look hard enough through their forum.

Yep, they sure don't have a lot of tolerance for stupidity. Or poor spelling for that matter. And the admin is in jail in Canada now, probably facing extradition to the US on murder charges.
Regarding the original Anarchist's Cookbook, couldn't you say that it's worth reading to find out how NOT to do it?