N.C. Teacher Fired for Milk Experiment (chugging)

[PfcHammer]

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040610/ap_on_fe_st/milk_experiment_2

N.C. Teacher Fired for Milk Experiment
Wed Jun 9, 9:39 PM ET Add Strange News - AP to My Yahoo!

SMITHFIELD, N.C. - A science teacher who conducted an experiment in which students chugged milk until they vomited has been dismissed.

The Johnston County school board voted 5-1 Tuesday to end Jeff Ferguson's contract seven months after he was suspended over the experiment. Ferguson had taught chemistry and physics at Smithfield-Selma High School for three years.

...

"We were led to believe that if we kept on the quiet side that things would be OK," he said. "It's all about who you rub the wrong way, and if you'll be quiet, we'll broker a deal, and then we'll break the deal. The whole thing is a political joke."

Ferguson was suspended with pay in November after some of his honors chemistry students took part in a milk-chugging experiment to test the body's ability to neutralize acids. Each student was given a gallon of milk and tried to drink it in an hour. Some students drank until they vomited, the body's reaction when it can no longer handle the acids in milk.



Got milk ? It takes me a week or 2 to finish a gallon of milk. Very, very strange.

[NashVegas]

1. Well

some of the students probably have ingested - and puked out - worse substances.

[bleedingheart]

2. I had a chemistry teacher once who let us

taste hydrochloric acid...it was much reduced in its strength but he had us dip a stick in it and touch it to our tongues...and Voila! we discovered it tasted faintly like puke...it was his way of showing us that the acid was the same stuff in our tummies...

[JM]

3. I had a chem professor in HS

1) who accidentally chased us out of the room with a nitric acid fog (the fume hood broke)

2) who lanched a 50ml beaker and part of a lab desk into the ceiling using too much sodium and too little water. They evacuated the school thinking a bomb went off.

JM

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. Really? It just tasted sour to me

which is what you'd expect - sour being acid. Now, if you mixed a little parmesan in with it, I could understand the taste ...

[yellowcanine]

4. He probably should not have done this but firing him seems excessive.

He sounds like a creative teacher who got a little carried away. I think a letter of reprimand in his file should have sufficed. Not sure that anyone was really endangered here, mostly it is just kind of gross. The school board sounds like a bunch of pantywaists. I hope the students protest.

[silverpatronus]

5. this seems...

slightly irresponsible IMO. but fired? reprimanded yes. suspended perhaps. fired? i don't think so.