https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/meeting-the-tigers-of-the-lab/4017185.article

Practical teaching strikes a balance between removing hazards and learning to respect them

By Derek Lowe
28 March 2023

Over the years, there have been all sorts of initiatives (in several different countries) to reform or modernise the ways in which chemistry is taught. Then the pandemic hit the experimental science courses particularly hard, naturally, since it really is impossible to do laboratory work remotely. I’ve advocated (in this column and elsewhere) the view that hands-on experience with lab work is an essentially part of chemistry and biology training, and I’ve been very glad to see its return (see Chemistry World, October 2022, p19).

There is some benefit to students getting a look at one of the tigers, to know them for tigers, and to realise that their safety is ultimately in their own hands

But there’s another issue in chemistry teaching that has never gone away, because it has never really been resolved: how dangerous does it have to be? There are injuries and even deaths in graduate chemistry work, but at least there one has the fallback explanation that some of this is research involving reactions that have not been run before and substances that have never been investigated. Truth be told, however, too many of these incidents involve less-experienced graduate students handling reagents whose hazards have long been recognised. The tragic death in 2009 of Sheri Sangji at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) came down to improper handling of tert-butyllithium, a reagent whose unstoppable spontaneous flammability is well known to every experienced synthetic organic chemist. That leaves very few excuses for careless supervision when someone who is only in their third month in the lab is handling it. Sangji was not wearing a lab coat, and there was !
no one who said otherwise.

Undergraduates are the very definition of inexperienced workers in a lab setting, and their unpredictability has to be taken into account
There is even less room for excuse-making in undergraduate courses. The lab work in these consists of well-known reactions chosen for illustrating key features of organic chemistry in parallel with the classroom material, and the details are almost invariably well worked out. But undergraduates are the very definition of inexperienced workers in a lab setting, and their unpredictability has to be taken into account when designing teaching experiments. I well recall my days as a graduate teaching assistant, when I saw mistakes made that I had completely failed to anticipate, mostly through lack of a vigorous enough imagination on my part.

(more at URL above)

---
For more information about the DCHAS-L e-mail list, contact the Divisional membership chair at membership**At_Symbol_Here**dchas.org