Well my chemistry education is a bit atypical to say the least. Went to two secondary schools, one of them didn't teach science at all, at least nothing anybody could ever learn from and the second, that was better (classic autism, aspie spesh schools respectively) but still didn't have great equipment, and my teacher didn't even know how to get a thermite reaction going properly)
Pretty much all the theory I know is from reading books and reading online, and almost all the practical, aside from things like throwing alkali metals in water, dissolving magnesium or calcium metal in acid, tests for CO2, O2 and hydrogen in test tubes with lit or smouldering wooden splints...
Buggers didn't have much more than test tubes. I never even saw a round bottom flask, let alone a hotplate with magnetic stirring, or a rotavap. Only thing they had that I want, is a fume hood (for the kind of things that need one I work outside, wearing protective gear, at least until I can get to building a fume hood for the indoor lab). So I pretty much taught myself 98% of what I know; starting with botany and mycology, when I was old enough to teach myself to read ( age 4, or so I'm told), since that didn't need me to have a bank card to go and buy glassware etc, and I could do simple things like extract the amavadine from fly agaric mushrooms (I didn't KNOW what it was at the time, I just knew as much as 'has to be some kind of transition metal complex without knowing which transition metal; I'd assumed cobalt or perhaps a copper complex, although money was on the former, I didn't have any knowledge of organovanadium chemistry at that age, and unfortunately, was unable to isolate sufficient of the material to decompose it and look at the flame spectrum, etc. [Amanita muscaria is a hyperaccumulator species, in this case for the element vanadium, forms a complex called amavadine, a rather unusual biomolecule containing an octacoordinate vanadium (IV) atom, bound by a pair of ligands which themselves form a cyclic structure, each coordinating to the central V atom via 3 oxygen and a nitrogen atom, likely functioning as a bromoperoxidase) and render it in its cationic state, wherein it becomes a deep, deep vivid blue, which has a really quite attractive color.
And between that, and the huge range of natural products plants and fungi produce, from medicines, to poisons, to the just plain odd (such as say, ascaridole, found in the Epazote plant, and in Boldo, which to the best of my knowledge are the only organic peroxides found in nature, I found it rather fascinating that such an unstable sort of compound as an organoperoxide would ever exist in a natural source, and indeed the essential oil of epazote, contains a quite variable (around 15% to a staggering 70%) amount of it (structurally its a derivative of alpha-terpinene, lacking one of the double bonds in the cyclic ring, and the second one being rearranged axially to a peroxide bridge between the two alkyl sidechains on the ring, which are oriented -para to each other, the peroxide bridge oriented out of the plane of the ring, in line with the methyl and 1-methylethyl group). Used in small amounts (although its toxic) in some cooking, (the leaves, not the essential oil) as a flavouring, the pure compound itself being, unsurprisingly for an organoperoxide, explosive. And whilst I'm not sure, it wouldn't surprise me much if essential oil containing the maximum levels of the stuff was too...at any rate I'd certainly not put it in one of those essential oil vaporizer lamps
)
And the things plants, fungi, etc. can do in such mild conditions with enzymes, and the way they can perform stereochemically selective biosynthesis of things so complex that we took many years to so much as determine the structure at all, let alone perform the synthesis of, such as say, the marine polyethers palytoxin and maitotoxin always got me fascinated, being nothing short of absolutely staggering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascaridole
