A junior high school teacher with the Gamagori Board of Education in Gamagōri-shi, a city in Aichi-ken (Aichi Prefecture), is reported to have forced two third-year students to drink diluted hydrochloric acid in his science class late last year as a punishment for their failed experiment.
Hydrochloric acid (see photo to the left) is a strong corrosive - but it is found in the human stomach. One of the key uses of hydrochloric acid is to remove rust from iron ore and steel before further processing. Of course, the proper concentration of acid is required...
Read the full story HERE from The Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
Holy smokes! Can't we just fail the class? That's what happened to me in Chemistry back in high school.I was lousy in chemistry - never studied in school - and was never punished in any way except with a failure to pass the course meaning I still needed to acquire another credit for my high school diploma.
The stupidest punishment I ever received in school was for the time I skipped a week of school after having had enough of bullying. Caught on my birthday, my punishment (as if I hadn't been punished enough from bullying by students) was to be suspended from school for a week.
So... let's see... I skip school for a week, and to stop that from happening again I get to miss ANOTHER week of school? Cool!
Idiots.
My friend Rob and I once got caught for not going to a school assembly. As punishment from the vice-principal, we were told to each pick up a garbage bag's worth of trash from around the school. Bordering a highway, there was a lot of trash. We picked it up quickly and left the trash bags on the desk of the vice-principal (he was out of the office) and left. It was never mentioned again - except by Rob and myself marveling at our audacity to leave the bags on top of his desk piled with work.
You can tell... I wasn't really bad. And neither were those two Japanese junior high school kids. Drinking a corrosive!
Yes, the teacher mixed the concoction perfectly - but he might not have. He's a junior high school science teacher - not a Nobel Prize winning chemist!
This teachers deserves some serious punishment himself, but I leave that up to the powers that be to determine what. At least a new job placement in another city.
As for me - what did I learn from my punishment? Teachers are idiots sometimes, I suppose. You all know I was a teacher for three years in various junior high schools in Japan. I also taught piano and clarinet after journalism school, and 'taught' or coached women's soccer for eight years. I've also been teaching readers via this blog coming up to four years.
Luckily for me, I also grew a 30 centimeters (12-inches) taller, developed a more in-your-face attitude (since tempered) and stood up for myself so as to not be bullied again.
I can't even imagine what these poor kids in Japan are going through.
But... if you are reading this... it gets better. And telling someone about the abuse is the right thing to do.
Oh... The photo above is from Wikipedia, courtesy of http://woelen.homescience.net/science/index.html. It shows a 30 percent solution of hydrochloric acid.
The acid the kids were forced to drink was a 35 percent solution.
Industrial-grade solution consists of 30-34 percent - higher solutions evaporate quicker.
Household cleaners and such using hydrochloric acid tend to contain between 10-12 per cent solutions.
Hydrochloric acid is used in the production of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine, and as a Table II precursor, is listed under the 1988 United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances.
Those kids had a pretty strong solution to imbibe...
Cheers
Andrew Joseph
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