Sad testimony from the victim of the 2014 Beacon School "rainbow demonstration" incident:
The Beacon High School student who was horrifically burned in a class chemistry experiment gone awry in 2014 testified Friday that he takes off his glasses to avoid seeing strangers’ stares.
“I tried not to look at people directly in the eye. I took my glasses off. Then I can’t really see details far away,” Alonzo Yanes, now 21, said during his second day on the witness stand in his Manhattan Supreme Court civil suit trial.
“This made it easier for me. Then I’m not really focused on peoples’ faces,” Yanes, who now bears scars on his face, neck, arms, hands and legs, continued as his glasses sat folded in front of him in the courtroom. “The world wasn’t very accepting of the way that I physically looked.”
Yanes — who was 16-years-old when a fireball engulfed him after his teacher Anna Poole performed a botched “Rainbow Experiment” — recalled his friends and sister’s shocked looks when they first visited him in the hospital...Maybe we could stop doing the rainbow demonstration?
You'd think it was that simple, but YouTube and its 10000 variations of "Rainbow" and "Woosh Jug" live forever. In general, secondary school chemistry teachers do not major in chemistry: They major in education with some chemistry or science thrown in, so they do not get educated or trained in handling hazardous materials properly. If the problem is to be fixed, it needs to be fixed at the source.
ReplyDeleteI said that somewhere before: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jchas.2014.01.009