I had an interesting experience in an Advanced Biology class...worst class ever.
We were supposed to be studying genetics by selecting and breeding good old fruit flies.
The teacher bought the flies, but not the fly-anesthetic for us to figure out which were male and which were female.
Instead, she used diethyl-ether. She dunked the flies in diethyl ether.
Needless to say, anesthetics that work on humans don't necessarily work well on flies. About half the flies drowned. The rest didn't stay anesthetized for long enough--meaning we'd start flippin' 'em over and get to counting their belly-hairs, and they'd flip over and fly away. The ones we could count were in no shape to reproduce later.
So now we have a completely failed scientific experiment, a hundred fruit flies flitting about the room, and a teacher that is high on ether.
The teacher had an eating disorder (putting it mildly), and had M&Ms and HoHos (I saw them when looking for staples one day) stashed in various places in the room. A hundred flies became a thousand in about a week.
The same teacher, during dissections, wanted to "give" people "extra specimens" to work on, because I guess there weren't enough 15-year-old formaldehyde-drenched baby sharks to go around. She pulled goldfish out of her aquarium, and dropped them into isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol to kill them. I remember it took them way too long to die. Moreover, the goldfish were not the kind that get really big. They were little two-inch things, with half their volume taken up by the swim bladder. Dissecting them with our woefully blunt scalpels was impossible.
The same teacher had a six-foot green iquana that had free reign of the room. Every once in a while, we would come into class, sit down, and suddenly a girl would shriek, and then you would hear the thing skittering across the room to its cage.
Worst class ever.
