Chalk boards offer a unique and attention-grabbing way to showcase menu items and specials, helping to draw in people and differentiate an establishment from its competitors.īy incorporating creative designs and eye-catching illustrations, chalk boards can help to create a memorable and impactful brand identity for a restaurant or cafe. With her there, describing the shape of an orbit as she drew it, or clicking the chalk on an atom’s nucleus and saying “nucleus” at the same time so we were sure not to miss it, she brought science to life for me in a way a textbook could not have.In a crowded food market, it can be difficult for venues and cafes to stand out. But it was not the textbooks that made science infiltrate my brain It was Miss Babb and a piece of chalk, her writing on a blank field. The school provided, of course, a science textbook, with lovely illustrations and photographs, some in color, and detailed descriptions in prose, of the very same things Miss Babb drew on the board. It gives the student more than something to look at it provides a necessary focus.ĭuring science lessons, when Miss Babb drew the solar system or the structure of a molecule on the blackboard, my mind became inflamed with new ways of seeing the universe.
The Smart Board is futuristic, yet it serves the same purpose as the blackboard of my childhood. Often it was the student with the highest score on a test who was invited to pound two erasers together, happy in a billowing cloud of quite possibly lung-damaging dust.Īt Maddy’s middle school, Smart Boards are now front and center, and on these interactive whiteboards, she and her fellow scholars and their teachers can connect to the Internet and display bits and pieces of information, work out problems and ideas, annotate and edit their work, shuffle digital objects spatially in order to find new connections. These erasers needed regular cleaning to knock loose all that chalk crammed into the felt’s pores, and while it was occasionally a punishment to clean the erasers, it was most often, at my school, a privilege. Slates and chalkboards were often cleaned with dry rags, and no doubt sleeves, but in the late 19 th century, erasers were developed for this task, blocks of wood (later pressed cardboard) covered with tufted felt, usually black or gray. But the whiteboard disallows a long-standing classroom rite: cleaning the erasers. Whiteboards are the rule these days, and all to the better, it seems, if only for their lack of screeching. The blackboard had been faithfully reconstructed as a souvenir of the school’s past, while the teacher and students mainly used the whiteboards that covered the other walls. The last time I saw a real blackboard in a classroom was during a visit to a still-functioning one-room schoolhouse near Hollister, California. In my daughter’s schools, computers, scads of them, are replaced every two to three years. Imagine that, a classroom machine so durable and flexible. In the 20 th century, blackboards were mostly porcelain-enameled steel and could last 10 to 20 years. By 1840 blackboards were manufactured commercially, smoothly planed wooden boards coated with a thick, porcelain-based paint. Like many of the best tools, the blackboard is a simple machine, and in the 19 th century, in rural areas particularly, it was often made from scratch, rough pine boards nailed together and covered with a mixture of egg whites and the carbon leavings from charred potatoes. Students no longer simply listened to the teacher they had reason to look up from their desks. The blackboard illustrates and is illustrated.
Teachers now had a flexible and versatile visual aid, a device that was both textbook and blank page, as well as a laboratory, and most importantly, a point of focus. Although the term blackboard did not appear until 1815, the use of these cobbled-together slates spread quickly by 1809, every public school in Philadelphia was using them.
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