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. Slate blackboards weem to do just fine in freezing Minnesota weather.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. And come to think of it, tht barn was never heated either, all tht time. It was used there for another 30-40 years. One of our horse barns had a chunk of blackboard near the feed room, that was rescued from the old country schoolhouse. Many of those blackboards were recycled then, and used for many more years. Yet the slate blackboards in most of them was still in good shape when the schools were consolidated, and the old schoolhouses converted to other uses, or demolished. So the blackboards probably froze every night during the winter. And given the minimal amount of insulation in many of those old buildings, it soon cooled off to just as cold as it was outside. The schoolhouse was completely unheated overnight, and on weekends. And students sometimes kept their coats on for the first hour of so of classes, until the building warmed up. The teacher had to arrive early, and stoke up the stove to heat up the building. And those buildings often were heated by wood stoves, but only during the time school was in session. Many of the early one-room schoolhouses in rural Minnesota had real slate blackboards.
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