The other day there was a news item which said blackboards would be replaced by interactive ‘smartboards’ in classrooms shortly. Surely, the digital generation needs the constant stimulus of bytes, to keep itself awake and abreast of the latest in every field of knowledge.
But it would never know the romance of the inanimate blackboard that stood as a sentinel to all knowledge imparted and absorbed when eyes and ears were not being subjected to incessant assault by information technology.
It was in a way a misnomer to call it a blackboard, for oftentimes it was a greyish expanse, coated with chalk powder, except when you returned from the holidays. It would then be a pitch-black matt surface, which both tempted and threatened at once. To deface it seemed sacrilegious while the urge to be the first to imprint white on black was almost painful to resist. The teacher who had the first hour of the first day seemed immune to such conflicts and went about scrawling all over the surface, with Mathematics or English in good, bad, indifferent handwriting.
Writing on the blackboard was an art that had to be assiduously cultivated. While many of those who taught were themselves found inadequate on this front, the student found to her or his dismay how aneamic the handwriting turned out to be when called on rare occasions to write out an answer or work out a problem. Letters and numbers became your nemesis as you tried to keep them in shape or uniform size, or worse still, not proceed in steep slanting lines upward or downward. Even students with the best handwriting in their slates and notebooks were stumped when they had to magnify the letters tenfold and twentyfold and make the lines behave.
In spite of such challenges, many students harboured the hope and longing to be called to the blackboard to write. That was a moment of triumph and glory when they were called upon to display to their peers what they had mastered. There were also occasions when you were called to work out something you were at a loss to figure out and tentatively went on writing and erasing as your mates either heckled or looked sleepy and bored, depending on the time of the day and their disposition towards you.
The class leader usually had the honour of writing details about the class that was to follow, unless she had a poor handwriting. In my ninth standard this scheme of things was given up and it was a free-for-all. It was a race between the front-benchers and others to reach the board even as the teacher of the previous class had scarcely stepped out of the classroom. Sheela, my dear friend, ran to the board, erased the writing from the previous class swiftly and wrote on the next class and triumphantly marched back to her seat, unaware of the cause of the burst of laughter from us all. Convulsed with mirth we could only point to the board, which displayed the next class as ENGLISH PEOTRY. Horrified, she ran back and hastily erased the T, which made it ENGLISH PEORY. The class became delirious with mirth as the sporting teacher walked in announcing, “I seem to be teaching a new subject today.”
If writing on the board was a coveted job, erasing with a duster was the most attractive chore in a classroom. With fiendish glee one went about doing a thorough job of erasing and going over the area over and ever again until no lines from the previous class were visible even vaguely. And then the welcome breather one got when you could take the duster out of the classroom to shake out all the chalk powder and catch a glimpse of what went on in the corridors and verandahs.
Copying from blackboards was a necessary evil, particularly for myopic ones like me. As we rushed to the board to scribble the home work or lessons in our rough notebooks, the monitor threatened to establish her authority by wiping the board. Many a battle has been fought at the blackboard.
Forgot all about chalk pieces. They offered a world of their own. The tiny white stubs were chewable tidbits, something you relished when you were a tiny tot, defiant against all attempts on the part of elders to prevent and to admonish you for the surreptitious pleasure. The fragrance of earth after the first spell of rains was somehow trapped in those delicious pieces of chalk, which of course came out of mother earth. As you graduated from the stubby pencils in the sixth standard to the use of ink pens, the chalk was a handy tool to take care of mini-disasters. A blob of ink on the notebook was absorbed by the chalk stub. A frantic attempt to scrub the chalk around the threads of the neck to stem the leaking pen never quite did the job, but you did persist. And carving of figures on chalk pieces with the forbidden razor blade, printing AF on your friend’s shirt back with a chalk saturated with the letters in ink, constituted little thrills that enlivened otherwise uneventful schooldays.
The teachers also loved the chalk stubs for wholly different reasons. Miss Sugantham, our science teacher with a jolly disposition, could aim and shoot a little stub to startle a dozing student or somebody plotting some mischief in the backbenches. Some of the habitual offenders eventually grew brazen enough to boast about their hoard of chalk stubs as trophies.
The coloured chalk did not have the same allure as the white chalk pieces did. Their pastel shades looked dull and watered down on the blackboard, unless they were soaked in water and applied thick to sport a brighter shade. That brings to mind the star system our school adopted in our fourth and fifth standards. The different houses were given plus and minus points in the form of little white stars on top of the board against the house names. Ten small white stars added up to make one large pink star. This was long before Hogwarts and its system of points or even their author was born. A pink star would be degraded into a few white stars if any student of the house gave cause for negative points or if the whole house failed miserably in any performance. Tempers ran high following such eventualities and friends became foes for days until the stars reigned supreme again.
The coloured chalks had their field day, believe me, in my college years. Once a year Fatima College, my alma mater in Madurai, held a kolam competition. There were many more events which made us celebrate Pongal by cooking under the trees, and Christmas with us singing a choir of carols in front of a decorated Christmas tree. Practised equality of religions with equal enthusiasm.
Going back to the chalk. As part of the kolam competiton, where each class was apportioned space on the verandah, it was also allotted blackboards, which had to be covered with drawings. Depending on the size of the class the size of the board differed. We English Majors numbering only eight had only a single small board and were thankful for our lot. None of us had great artistic skills. We could manage a passable kolam. But to cover an entire board was a tall order. If my memory is to be trusted, Prema and Clara went on to do their best on the board while the rest of us lounged on chairs and kept throwing our inexpert suggestions and unwarranted criticism at the duo.
What we really enjoyed was walking through the corridors and classrooms to look at the prize-winning entries. The Zoology Majors won it hands down every time.
Not because they were a burgeoning group of more than thirty, but they really sported abundant talent honed by drawing frogs, beetles and cockroaches and the human anatomy for their record note books. They had the widest expanse to cover in their labs. Blackboards from end to end measuring something like twelve feet by five feet. And they came up with the most imaginative themes and figures and interesting blurbs. Coloured and white chalk provided a feast for the eyes and we wondered how heartbroken the artists would be to wipe it all clean the next day to yield ground for the frogs and earthworms.
I have seen photographs of green-coloured blackboards, pardon me for the oxymoron. The term ‘greenboard’ somehow does not sound right and does less to convey the meaning. Apparently yellow or cream-coloured chalks are used to write on them. But it seemed to lack the drama of the black and white and I squarely disapprove of such heretical practices.
My joy knew no bounds when I saw the double blackboard at the Harvard Business School, where I happened to watch a class full of executives and CEOs and students from across the globe. So, even they need the blackboard, I mused happily. The professor walked up and down the aisles as he posed questions to the ‘students’ to elicit answers which he promptly wrote on the board in big bold letters. He was trying to explain an Accounting theory and enabling the students to figure out the steps logically. As he came to the last line at the bottom of the board he pressed a button and hey presto, the board just slid upwards smoothly, revealing a second board underneath. The second board at the bottom was filled in no time and he went on to the adjoining board, and that too slid up to reveal a fourth surface. By the time the class was over four blackboards contained the entire lesson fully worked out and I found most of the students copying it all in their notebooks.
A final surprise was in store for me. The professor explained that the board was glass with a matt surface while it was the wall behind that was painted black. And of course he used the good old white chalk and the entire board was later wiped with a wet towel.
Let the Smartboards come into the class. No problem. But this Harvard classroom made it clear to me that blackboards are here to stay and no power on earth can abolish or banish them without jeopardising the process of teaching and learning.
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