Before your first investigation, you and a parent or guardian both sign this. No signature, no lab work — there is no discretion in that, for anybody.
The reference behind it, including how to read a label and a safety data sheet, is Lab Safety and WHMIS.
I agree to
- Wear eye protection from the moment lab work starts until the last person has finished cleaning up
- Tie back long hair, secure loose sleeves, and wear closed-toe shoes on lab days
- Read the whole investigation before touching any equipment
- Follow the procedure as written, and ask before changing anything
- Never eat, drink, chew, or taste anything in the lab, and wash my hands before leaving
- Never pipette by mouth, with any liquid, including water
- Waft odours toward me rather than inhaling directly
- Treat all glassware near a heat source as hot, because hot glassware looks exactly like cold glassware
- Point the open end of a heated tube away from everyone, including me
- Never heat a sealed container, and never seal a reaction that produces a gas
- Add acid to water and never water to acid
- Never return unused chemical to the stock bottle
- Check where the waste from my procedure goes before I start, and put nothing down the drain unless I have been told to
- Know where the eyewash, safety shower, fire extinguisher, fire blanket, spill kit, and exits are before I need them
- Report every spill, break, cut, burn, and splash immediately, however small
- Leave my station cleaner than I found it
- Never remove chemicals or equipment from the room
The two Grade 11 additions
This year you design investigations, which means you will propose procedures I have not written, using solutions whose concentration you chose. So two more items, and they are the ones that make the rest of the list work.
- Before running any procedure I designed, I will have it checked by the teacher — including what could go wrong, what I would do if it did, and where the waste goes
- I will not change the amount, the concentration, or the rate of addition in a procedure without asking first
That check is not a formality and it is not a judgement of your plan. Working scientists have their procedures reviewed by somebody else, for exactly the reason you need it: the person who wrote the plan is the person least able to see what it assumes.
The second item is the one students find surprising. Scale is a safety variable in its own right. A reaction that warms a test tube gently can be violent in a beaker ten times the size, because the heat it produces grows faster than the surface it can escape through. “It worked fine when we did less of it” is not a reason to do more of it — it is a description of the last safe version.
Conduct that ends lab privileges
Horseplay, ignoring an instruction, working with equipment before the check, or interfering with somebody else’s safety. You will complete the work as a written assignment instead, and we will talk with home. This is not about being strict — it is that a lab only works when everyone in the room can rely on everyone else.
The one that matters most
Tell me the moment something goes wrong. A small spill handled in thirty seconds is nothing at all. The same spill hidden for ten minutes is an incident, and occasionally an injury. You will never be in trouble for reporting an accident — not once, not ever. The only thing that gets you in trouble here is not reporting one.
Also read: What to Bring for lab days, Measuring Well for handling the glassware, and Acids and Bases before the neutralisation work in Unit 2.