Mr Leader’s Great Gas Experiment

Long before I ever tried to reach a room of disengaged students, I fell in love with science myself. I was eight years old, in my parents’ kitchen, with nothing more than a family cooker and a dish of soapy water.

I’d found that if you passed the gas from the pilot light through soapy water, it bubbled beautifully. Then I held a flame to the bubbles as they popped. To an eight-year-old, that was spectacular. I never forgot it.

Decades later, as a lab technician, I found a use for it I never expected.

The Disengaged Students Nobody Could Reach

One of the science teachers had a remedial group, five disengaged students who’d completely checked out. Noisy, rude, out of control, and utterly uninterested in anything science-related. He was frustrated, and he asked me what I could do to get them to at least settle down long enough to teach something.

I had a decent rapport with most students, and I thought back to that soapy water and that pilot light. If it had captured my imagination at eight, maybe it would do the same for a room of teenagers who’d given up caring.

So we recreated it, properly this time. A large trough of soapy water, a rubber hose run from a gas tap with the Bunsen burner itself removed, gas bubbling straight through the soap. I hadn’t accounted for one thing: the bubbles didn’t just sit on the surface. They rose into the air.

Someone put a flame to one, mid-air.

It was even more spectacular than I would have thought of.

It Worked. Perhaps Too Well.

It got their attention completely. For the first time, the teacher had a room quiet enough to actually explain what was happening. Why the gas burned the way it did, what was going on chemically while it happened, all of it finally landed. That part was exactly what we’d hoped for.

What I hadn’t planned for came afterwards, in three separate, escalating problems.

First, the lab ceiling started collecting soot. Those Victorian labs had ceilings high enough that the flames took a few seconds just to reach them, and once the soot was up there, it stayed. Too high to safely clean, it remained on that ceiling for years, right up until the building itself was demolished.

Second, that single lesson became the only thing those students wanted. Not science generally. Specifically “Mr Leader’s Great Gas Experiment,” repeatedly, whether it made sense for the lesson or not.

Third, and this is the one that actually caused real problems: the flames were visible from other labs, and from the humanities block. Lessons in those rooms had to stop. Students lost concentration, distracted by whatever was clearly happening next door. And when it was eventually their turn for a science lesson, they wanted the same thing too.

Questions got asked. We stopped doing it not long after.

What I’d Do Differently

Looking back, this is exactly the kind of moment a mastermind group would have caught before it became a problem. I didn’t run the idea past anyone. I had a good instinct, tried it, and it worked, brilliantly, in the room it was meant for. What I didn’t have was a second pair of eyes asking the obvious question: what happens to everyone else in the building while this is going on?

That’s the thing about solving a problem entirely on your own. You can be completely right about the solution and still miss the consequences sitting just outside the room you’re focused on. A room full of teachers critiquing each other’s experiments would probably have spotted it. Even just one colleague asked “what do you think might go wrong here” would likely have caught the soot, the distraction, and the flames visible next door, before any of it happened. If you want to see what that kind of critique structure actually looked like in practice, I’ve written about it elsewhere on this site.

I’d still do the experiment again. I’d just talk it through with someone first, and I’d probably check current CLEAPSS guidance before I did.

Hundreds of students must have looked up at that ceiling over the years without ever knowing why it was there. I saw it several times a day, for years. Every single time, it reminded me of that small group of disengaged students, and the moment they finally became teachable, if only for one afternoon.