It was a long time ago that I heard this story.
I was in Baltimore, and the story was relayed to me by a School Principal who I used to be close to. He told me because of my Art Education background.
It seems one of the young teachers he knew was the art teacher in one of the junior high schools. This teacher was not part of my program, was not a student teacher under my direction and had nothing to do with me so that I take no responsibility for this event. I did know her at that time, but that is only guilt by association.
You may have experienced smoke drawing. You could take a candle and hold a paper just above the flame, and if you were a careful manipulator you could get a smoke drawing. You would have to be very adept at this to get any kind of an image, but one was possible.
You could also, very carefully draw with an accelerant such as turpentine or varsol and light it with a match, and very quickly blow it out and get a burned image into the paper. This would work better than the candle but was much more likely to catch on fire. However, if you were nuts and in an experimental mood, that would work.
The young junior high school art teacher knew about these methods and decided that this would work well for her classes. Not carefully thinking out the possibilities, she knew that the fire and smoke would captivate a teen aged audience.
She went shopping and purchased 30 squeeze bottles, the kind we usually see for catsup and mustard. She carefully poured some gasoline into each of the bottles and distributed the bottles, along with a piece of paper, to each child. She had them work on a drawing, which she would light herself so as not to create a hazard. Failing to recognize the hazard of gasoline fumes because after all, she opened some windows, she lit the first drawing so the kids could see.
The school was forced to rebuild one wing of the building after it was burned to the ground.
However, no children were hurt in the making of this very real story.
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