Text: During his Peace Corps years teaching chemistry in Fiji, JW would take his students down to the bay every now and then with a chunk of sodium. His school lab had real sodium, kept in oil. He would fish out a small piece and throw it as far as possible into the water. It would skim across the surface and then catch fire and sometimes explode. The students loved it. He had seen it done by another teacher before trying it himself.

Context: JW is my father. He served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Fiji for two years following his undergraduate studies, teaching high school chemistry at a local school. The demonstration is not part of any sanctioned curriculum, but rather an informal reward to a well-behaved class. It is generally considered dangerous, and therefore impossible in a well supervised urban school setting. JW has not seen the practice done outside of his peace corps years in Fiji. He has retold this story to me on several occasions.

Analysis: This is a good example of occupational lore. The sodium demonstration is a chemistry teacher’s vernacular practice: it is not taught in the credentialing program, and the manuals tell you not to do it; you learn it from your own teacher and transmit it to your students. Its status as both pedagogically vivid and institutionally suspect is what gives it folkloric stability: every chemistry teacher who has ever done it remembers their own teacher’s version, and JW’s repeated retelling of the story, with the same opening and the same skimming and the same explosion, is itself an iteration of the form that keeps the practice circulating. The Peace Corps placement adds a second layer. An American chemistry-teacher folkway moved with JW to Fiji and entered a different pedagogical ecology, where his students may now be carrying it forward as their own, possibly without ever knowing whose Ohio classroom it had been picked up from in the first place.