I owe my start in science thanks to amateur chemistry (it was my hobby in middle and high school). I almost blew myself up once, and also burned my hand with bromine. And my clothes got quite a few holes from acids (mainly H2SO4 that came from Ace Hardware as drain cleaner). But I learned so much! I'm glad my parents didn't stop me.
Let's see: spilled some nitrogen tri-iodide on the floor in my high school. Even on the following day people were walking on the dried crystals, setting off small explosions that stained the linoleum brown (or was it violet?, it was 40 years ago...).
Also burned off my best friend's eye brows/lashes when he got a little too closely at the blackpowder I had lit.
A carbon arc I made using battery cells drew so much current through the salt-water "rheostat" that it boiled off ... hydrogen? I tripped over one of the wires and the whole casserole dish full of salt water (and with a live 110-volts wire soaking in it) came crashing down, shattering on the basement floor. The extension zip-cord was already smoking at that point anyway so I suppose it was a matter time before something gave. (The circuit breaker went a few times, but that was easily resettable).
Dry ice dumped into hot water in a 2-liter plastic bottle (lid screwed on tight) gave a nice demonstration of, I do not know, the explosive breaking point of PET plastics? I thought I had invented blowing up Coke bottles with dry-ice until the internet came around. I'm still however unaware of anyone also putting dry ice and hot water in a Dawn dish soap bottle and inverting it for a nice little water-rocket (until about the 3rd or 4th time when the plastic of the detergent bottle becomes a little "work-hardened" and explodes on the launch pad).
I think I made chloroform once (Nitric acid and ... formaldehyde? I don't remember). It smelled very nice though, whatever it was. I didn't take enough a whiff to find out for sure if it was the real thing.
My dad told me about covering potassium permanganate with glycerine as a small demonstration of spontaneous combustion.
Honestly though, I'm not sure I learned a lot of chemistry. If anything, the playing around with identifying metal salts by the color of their flame is about as close as I got to Real Science™. Perhaps though I got something out of it, something for my curiosity? Maybe an appreciation at least for atoms and compounds and their reactivity?
Chemistry is very hard to learn meaningfully/usefully, but it's great at teaching you that and how you can discover what something is and what it can do via indirect observations and interactions, without taking it apart and looking at all its pieces and how they fit together.
