Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Chalkboards

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why chalkboards are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Chalkboards. Known for being dusty. Famous for being scribbly. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why chalkboards are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Schmitt and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie, how's it going? Yeah, it's good. Good. It's good here too. This topic made me think about my whole educational history, but I am also an adult here in the present doing good.

I can taste and smell this topic. And the topic is chalkboards and beyond all the sensory overload. Katie, what's your relationship to or opinion of chalkboards? I mean, yeah, I don't know. Sensory overload is a word for it. I remember the smell of the chalkboards, the smell, especially like when you would like dust them up with the chalkboard erasers. Of course, there was the unpleasantness of chalkboards sometimes, especially when you get a piece of chalk that was really good, right? And crumbled really nice. That was the best thing. But then you'd sometimes get like a bad one, like a stale piece of chalk,

and you try to write on the chalkboard and nothing would come out and it'd make a horrible sound. That was like maybe the worst feeling in the entire world. horrible sound. That was like maybe the worst feeling in the entire world. Chalk can make a bad sound, right? Like there's the famous thing of fingernails on a chalkboard and that's supposed to be the worst. I found a few studies that claimed that there's a set of Hertz's of frequency that we don't like, which fingernails on a chalkboard fall into. But also one of them found that just chalk on a chalkboard is also in that set of frequencies. The range is 2000 to 4000 hertz. Watch out for that. I guess that's a bonus extra number right up top. Yeah. Apparently fingernails on a chalkboard are in there, but also just chalk on a chalkboard is in there. And that's part of why people can find that

annoying. But also maybe that's not the most famous annoying thing i feel like the dust and the the tactile experience also bothers people now of course when i was a kid and i would like taste some chalk it was a fun experience because i would you know like you put it in your mouth hearing this is new um and you know cleaning chalkboard erasers by smacking together always bad um but you know there's there's fun things about chalkboards, too. Like, okay, I'm sure I'll think about some of them soon, what was fun about them. I mean, I guess, like, hangman. Hangman was a good time.

Hangman was good. Yeah. Hangman was a good time. Hangman was good. Yeah, you draw a little man, and each time you try to guess a word, and each time you get it wrong, he gets a new body part, which is bad, though, for the little man, because once his body is whole, then he can be executed for his crimes. Okay, wait. I have to show this to you, Cause I got like a little chalkboard and then I got some like chalk pens, not really a hard chalk, but like sort of liquid chalk pens.

And then I drew on it and then I was going to like erase it. But then, uh, I guess I left it on too long. So now it's just permanent. Hang on. So this is what I'm stuck with on my chalkboard oh well you drew such a fun alien and star and planets and space scene yeah i do i mean it was like i was testing out the chalk and it was like well why don't i draw a little alien and a planet. And then I just didn't erase it soon enough. And now it's permanent.

That it's also, it's a very small chalkboard. It's almost like a little writing slate and it's a black background. I forgot that chalkboards are great for night scenes, especially if it's black, right? Like if you're drawing on paper and you're like time to do a night scene, it's like, great. There goes half my black crayon. It's over. Yeah. But chalkboard, it's black. Yeah. Right? Like if you're drawing on paper and you're like, time to do a night scene, it's like, great, there goes half my black crayon. It's over.

Yeah. But chalkboard, it's good. You got to worry about negative space. Yeah. So shout out chalkboards for making us dream of the stars, right? We can get up there easily. Yeah. And we're going to talk all about these boards.

And on every episode, First Fascinating Thing, about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called... Pardon me while I list these numbers. Haven't had enough stats and the intrigue they contain. So pardon me while I state these interesting facts. Pardon me, pardon me. Follow up with the takeaways.

You can't see this, but Alex spontaneously grew sideburns and then they fell off as soon as he stopped singing. Here's what happened. I received a very, very miniature version of what they did to Wolverine in the X-Men stories. My body is super capable of that. Otherwise, very ordinary. And that, folks, that was submitted by Printerbang on Discord.

We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a Missillion Wagon as possible. Submit through Discord or to SipPod at gmail.com. And chalkboards are a little bit of an older thing, but the first few numbers are about the present and the future. Because the first number is the ratio four to one. Four to one. That is one U.S. estimate of classroom whiteboard sales versus chalkboard sales as of the year 2000. Hmm.

They were selling about four whiteboards for every one chalkboard as of the start of the century. That tracks because I feel like chalkboards pretty much reigned supreme for me in elementary school until I hit about fifth grade. And then we started, the whiteboards started coming in. Me too, I think. And it really kind of varied based on how old or new the chunk of the school was. Like my high school had a much older chunk and a much newer chunk. And it just switched, I think, as you went across the building. Those classrooms had different smells. Like the old classroom smell had a specific odor and then the new classroom scent was different. And part of that may have been

because of the chalkboard versus whiteboard. I remember the whiteboard smells. We'd be sniffing those markers. Teachers would tell us, hey, stop sniffing those markers. So we'd go behind the corner of a building and sniff those markers again. Especially the ones, the thing I didn't understand

is we weren't supposed to sniff the markers because, you know, fumes bad, don't do it, child. But then they made smelly whiteboard markers with intentionally fruity smells. And then now you're telling me not to sniff this marker that smells like grape? Come on. Maybe it's because we were kids or we were bored or something. Like

now I'm thinking about how pencils felt and smelled and everything was so flavorful that we were writing with. That's weird. I think it's more weird that we stop being inquisitive about the smells of things as adults, because I think it is very natural to like, want to smell a thing or taste a thing. And then as adults are like, well, I'm too cool to sit here and smell this whiteboard. But you know, I think it is pretty natural when we look at sort of, hey, we got a nose. Why aren't we using it? But no, now we've got to be wine sommeliers if we want to use our noses. Yeah, let's get it back. Let's bring it back.

This episode will do it. Your ears will lead you. Because whiteboards, yeah, also smelly. And the magazine Education Week, at the time they interviewed a rep for a classroom supplier called Gantz Manufacturing, they said their whiteboards were outselling their chalkboards 4 to 1 in March of 2000. Was this a push by Big Whiteboard, or was there sort of a natural, like, of course the whiteboards are superior. Why did they take the classrooms by storm so quickly? It's a couple of things. Yeah, One of them is a push to be more

technologically advanced because chalkboard is an older vibe. And there's another Education Week piece here that says that as of the year 2002, digital whiteboards were also outselling chalkboards. Either an analog whiteboard or digital whiteboard as a school, you could say we're advancing. We're moving forward into the new century. The technology of a sheer surface and alcohol-based ink. And the other thing possibly pushing the rise of whiteboards is classroom computers. Oh, interesting. So kind of another tech thing. Okay.

How do we go from computer to whiteboards though? So I don't remember any of this, partly because I was just a kid. I was not making decisions, but there was this huge- You were making no decisions. Yeah. I was basically a puppet. I was a marionette. I just, you know, my parents moved me around.

You were a young bit of kelp in the ocean of the school. So the rise of computers in U.S. classrooms anyway really happens in the 90s. The Atlantic says that as of 1988, there was about one computer per 30 students in U.S. schools. And by 1999, that was one computer per 30 students in U.S. schools. And by 1999, that was one computer per five students. So in about a decade from one computer per 30 to one computer per five students, huge jump. And as this happened, there was a suspicion and a worry that chalk dust could damage classroom computers.

Oh, right. OK. Yeah, that makes sense. I know that I have sort of an archaeological dig in my keyboard of the various snacks that have been pulverized into a powder and formed sedimentary layers in there. So yeah, no, dust is bad for keyboards. Yeah. Most of my technology is primarily made of the seasoning on Wegmans store brand peanuts at this point. Yeah. That's, I don't use a Mac anymore. Really? It's just, you have to list your keyboard as an allergen.

Yeah. And like, I, I couldn't find real confirmation on whether chalk dust damages computers, but either way, a lot of schools said, Hey, let's switch to whiteboards for these rooms that have computers in them. So the computers last longer. Sure. Okay. Yeah. And that makes sense. I remember the slow introduction of computers in elementary school as well. Like it was so exciting to go into the computer lab and then like do Mavis beacon typing. And oh yeah, we had to like learn how to draw in a computer program where you could like drag and it would make a shape. And also computer switched from being like light text or green text on a black background to like mostly being sort of the inverse of that, which I think is interesting because that's similar to like you had chalkboards and then

you switch to whiteboards. I don't, I don't really know why. I guess it was just a difference in the monitor structure in terms of like we switched from different types of monitors that went from being sort of one type of monitor that was easier to do like light green or white on black versus just a full color monitor. Yeah, it is. When it was a very text protocol based computer. That's right. It was such a dark background. And then these graphical interfaces like Windows, they said, OK, brighten it up back to that more retro look because it's like, oh, right. If I blast my eyes with brightness, my brain is like it's daytime all the time and then I can't sleep. So we so we don't want chalky computers. And so we switch to whiteboards. Yeah, that was one of the reasons. And then this also isn't universal.

We all know that schools have various funding, various ages. There are still a ton of chalkboards in a ton of classrooms, and it's just sort of an ongoing shift in a lot of ways. The next number goes backward in time. It is 98 years. 98 years. That is the age of blackboard drawings accidentally rediscovered at a school in Oklahoma. Oh, hey. Yeah, like Atlas Obscura covered this. Apparently in 2015, there were like general contractors renovating classrooms at a school in Oklahoma because they were going to install smart boards like digital whiteboards or digital smart boards. And when they were pulling the wall apart, they discovered two blackboards underneath it from 1917. Okay. Be real with me, Alex. How many wieners? How many drawings of wieners? None that I saw online, which is amazing. The internet is extra full of that, you know,

forget it. Yeah. I'll link Atlas Obscura and they had pictures of like these blackboards had writing on them. It's as if they got bricked up in a hurry or something like there was just still classroom drawings on it. Nobody erased them before covering them. That's spooky. It's a little ghosty. It's like mid-class. We're like, oh, blackboards haunted. It's haunted.

Get out. Get out of the classroom. Right. Right. Yeah. Like, you know, like in Matilda, she lifts the piece of chalk with her mind because she's such a nerd. She uses it to, like, draw on the blackboard to scare Mrs. Trunchbull, I think. Professor Xavier it is.

Professor Xavier. She's a mutant. Oh, yes. Yes. It's a mutant. Oh, yes. It's Charles Xavier's Academy. Right. Yes. And she's she's got a friend who's got laser eyeballs. And but yeah, I mean, like if that if that actually happened in real life, first of all, she would be burned as a witch and then they would brick up the walls with the chalkboards in it. would be burned as a witch and then they would brick up the walls with the chalkboards in it.

Just something about stuff from a hundred years ago drawn on a chalkboard feels haunted or supernatural, even though it's just how these boards work. Like if you leave the chalk on them, it doesn't go away, especially if it's not exposed to, I guess, the elements or whatever. Yeah. You see the chalk slowly levitating and then it draws one of those like S shape, you know, like the S's that we used to draw. The Stussy. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm the lead singer of Incubus. I know. Sure. Yeah. I draw those all the time. Yeah. And this, this writing, like they had part of a music lesson drawn on it. There were doodles of pilgrims. And also, apparently, we know this is from 1917 because somebody had chalked a calendar for the month of December 1917. So this wasn't like carbon dated or whatever.

It's just somebody wrote the date on the chalkboard. And that's how we know. They also found a skeleton. Oh, sure. Yeah, I'm looking at one of them and it seems quite good. It's like a little girl in a dress blowing a bubble. And what's impressive to me is like the bubble, it's got sort of a rainbow bubble effect. It's nice.

Yeah, like it's pretty good art. And it is also fun about chalkboards to me like they can just be weird artifacts, but also like, you know, usually drawings by a teacher the wall. I think it's an artifact from 1917. Bet it's worth a lot of money. What's that name written on it? El Da Vinci? Whoa, amazing. Leonardo was in contact with little aliens and stars with smiley faces on them, for sure. Oh, yeah. He flew his helicopter up there or whatever. Sure. Yeah, I believe it.

Yeah, his little rotating chopper. Yeah. And next number brings us also back into the past. It is the year 1810. 1810. 1810. 1810. That is the year when a Scottish education reformer named James Pillans began teaching high school students in Edinburgh. And James Pillans is one candidate for the honor of inventor of the classroomasable, it solves a problem that isn't that intuitive, right? Like, okay, how do I demonstrate things to a class that is in a large format that they can all read, uh, except the ones who need glasses cause they're out of luck. Um, back

then at least. And then like, but also make it erasable. So it's like, well, this wall's done, let's build a new wall. Um, or like, you know, so it's a, it's a unique problem to classrooms. And it's very interesting to me, this, this idea of like, we have to make make impermanent art or impermanent visual aids? How do we do that? That's right. And about 200 years ago, they started doing this. And it leads us into one of a couple takeaways within the numbers here, because takeaway number one, the first classroom chalkboard was probably a bunch of handheld writing slates stuck together on a wall. Ah. Like the exact details are a little murky, but the basic process is based on solid information about how technology progressed.

And in particular, that students all had little writing slates before we had like wall chalkboards. Right. And then so you'd get like a bunch of waifs to kind of stand at the front of class and hold all the chalkboards together. Gather round, waifs. Gather round. Chop, chop, waifs. I know you have rickets, but get up here.

I know you have rickets, but get up here. When we, I guess, like, how did we discover that you could centuries, that kids were writing on little pieces of slate or things like it. And the impetus to invent that was that paper and pens and stuff like that were a lot more expensive back then. Yeah. far the most affordable way to let a kid write was here's one piece of slate stone or something like it. And here's incredibly cheap chalk and just keep redoing it on this one thing. Yeah. Cause like earlier you'd write on a piece of paper, that paper is probably worth about two days salary for you as a child laborer. And then if you get something wrong, you have to pull a plow across the field for 10 hours to afford another piece of paper.

Paper was just harder at the time. And so this was something they came up with, especially for children, because it was like, kids aren't writing anything important. They just need to drill, you know, lines of the Bible or whatever's in this dumb reader we gave them. So here's a slate. It's fine. Don't get us wrong. It's not that anyone cared about trees. They actively loathed trees at the time and sought their destruction.

It was to save on costs. It's like repeat after me, Waves. T trees are our enemy. Trees are our enemy. That was, that was the time. Yeah. Can't let the trees win. Um, yeah, no, I mean, that is interesting. I mean, was it hard to like source a large enough, cause I'm assuming that the slate that is like a naturally occurring rock that you can find and like excavate. But was it hard to find like a large chunk of slate that you could use as a chalkboard? Yeah, it was like challenging, but not impossible. And the origin of this like wall board, it was more of a teaching idea. Again, in general chalkboards, it's a plain surface that you can write on with chalk and

then erase and redo. And so kids were doing this with the easier to get small handheld things. There were also some cases where somebody just painted wood or something like it black and then used that over and over again, even though that wore out pretty quickly. But they just didn't give kids pens or quills or paper very often. Right. And chalk's another naturally occurring, like you can just kind of find chalk sometimes and use it and write with it. I think I, I grew up near a Canyon. And so there was actually like a lot of stuff that could be found like chalk, also like a clay. Uh, so I could just kind of like go and Michael's was my backyard, except not actually a Michael's, but, uh, a Canyon with like coyotes

and scorpions and stuff. Wait, Michael's the craft store? The craft store. Except outside and with scorpions. Yeah, chalk could be a whole separate episode if people want it. It turns out like the thing we call chalk for writing on a chalkboard, there's a few different minerals that can be that like gypsum or calcium based things. And so there was a lot of leeway for various ways of doing these little handheld writing slates and writing on them. And then the leap for putting them on a wall came from basically teachers deciding they wanted to present information visually. And a few people claim to be the inventor. Apparently in 1810, James Pillans in Scotland, he set up a wall chalkboard to teach geography. So he used various colored chalks to draw giant maps on a giant chalkboard.

a wall chalkboard in 1801 to teach math, like do large equations over a big space. But both stories allege that the teacher took a bunch of handheld writing slates for individual students and then just like stuck them together and tried to smooth out the borders and make one big slate on the wall. I mean, so that's interesting, though, to me that like there was a paradigm shift where it was, oh, we need to actually present visual information to a classroom full of kids. Because like what what would they do before then? Just kind of go around the classroom and whisper the information in each child's ear. Oh, that's very interpersonal. Wow. In a general way, especially in the U.S., schools might not be that similar to what we consider teaching today. It might be more of a thing where an adult is monitoring children while they just copy lines from books or something.

It's just not the same thing we think of today where it's like, well, if I'm a teacher, I need to do stuff. I need to put on a show and I need to be really active and getting these kids going. Yeah. I mean, I think that teaching itself has gone through a lot of evolution. I mean, like we used to basically like punish children who were left-handed, right? Like, oh, you're doing it wrong. Put it in the other hand and then like, you know, tie their hand, their left hand behind their back, you know, just this like sort of seeing children rather than being like these receptive beings who had their own preferences in terms of learning and their own needs. It was just like they are tiny adult templates and we we vomit out stuff onto them and then they turn into the adults we want. Although I guess some, some classrooms still might be like that. But yeah, I mean this idea that you kind of have to have a back and forth interaction with your students,

I guess we had to kind of come to that understanding represented by the chalkboard. Yeah. And people like disagree about all that element of it today. Like this is just a continuing societal conversation about like, what's the best way to teach kids? Like how interactive, what material, everything. We're still figuring it out. I think you grind up a book and you turn it into a smoothie. And then you get lots of fiber, too.

What if, like, when we were talking about school supplies before, we just revealed to the audience that we both ate everything? Like, well, the paste tasted like this and the markers tasted like this. You're joking, but I'm to a certain age. Let's see, because I ate crayon. I ate chalk. Crayon? Okay, yeah. Crayon.

Crayon. I probably did at some point, yeah. I'm sure I had some glue. I'm sure I tasted glitter once, and then that was probably a bad experience. Oh, and you get caught easily, right? Your parents are like, did you eat glitter? And you're like, no. And the light shines into their eyes from your mouth.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I definitely ate some paper. Oh, yeah. I ate paper for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I sometimes use paper as gum.

Just get a big chunk of paper and then start chewing it like it's chewing gum. get a big chunk of paper and then start chewing it like it's chewing gum. This is what we had to do before we had like tablets and smartphones as kids. Like you need something to entertain yourself with and it's not going to be like YouTube or coin run or whatever. It's going to be chewing on paper. Yeah, the Internet's a miracle, folks. It's a good thing. I think that paper built character. Okay. Yeah, the internet's a miracle, folks. It's a good thing. I think that paper-built character. Okay. Yeah. We're both full of character, so that makes sense. Right. And paper. Full of paper as well. Yeah. Yeah, we're basically trees. Trees are friends.

Trees are friends. Yeah, and these chalkboards. I'm going to link resources from the Smithsonian and also from the Museum of Teaching and Learning in Fullerton, California, because there's a bunch of just extant examples of children's writing slates, also chalk for them, also something called a slate pencil, which was made of a softer slate than the object you're writing on. And so that would make a line like it was super common that kids had these handheld slates. And the story of a bunch of them being stuck together to make a chalkboard might have been apocryphal, but somebody either did that or made the leap of let's make this big much later. It came much later. of let's make this big much later. It came much later. Someone's going to stick a bunch of iPads together and invent the giant iPad for classrooms. Like, sure, yeah.

If they could have, they would have. And because another number here is the 1830s, that's when commercially manufactured chalkboards started to become common in the U.S. And some were made from big pieces of slate. The Atlantic cites mining statistics from the 1890s. They also say that there was a small Pennsylvania town called Slatington. Okay.

In the 1890s, they produced nearly a million square feet of slate blackboards in one year and then shipped them by rail all over the U.S. So there was a whole industry like digging up the material for chalkboards. So like, did we continue to use slate for chalkboards in like for say our childhoods, or did they start to make chalkboards out of some other material? They've moved on, yeah. And even back in the day, they would also make chalkboards from wood. They would just cut wooden boards and then cover them in a thick paint. And then that would hold together as a board. Apparently also there were rural areas when this got going that would nail together pine boards and then cover that with a mixture of egg whites as a binding agent

and the carbon leavings from cooking, like char from cooking foods. They would mix that with egg whites. Oh, that's interesting. Splash that over wooden boards, and then that was a blackboard for them. That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, egg whites were used in a lot of sort of like art things like paint and stuff. There's like an egg white, uh, like tempura that actually lasts, it lasts a shockingly long time. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Especially early 1800s. A lot of

us people were like, I make everything everything for myself like i make my own clothes and everything so why don't i make a chalkboard sounds good and they would so they would start like taking burned cooking scrapings to get it going yeah imagine the smell though like we talked about we complained about the smell of like chalk powder imagine the smell of like a blackboard made out of egg white and cooking leavings. Yeah, boy. Look, you know what? In a pinch, you got a stew going. You just boil the blackboard.

Really? It was heavenly. It was like class smells like brunch. Oh, I love it. That was fantastic. Is that burnt bacon? Waifs just up at the front of the classroom licking the the blackboard trying trying to get some vitamins for their rickets oh the past yeah and then uh also like later on they started developing thick paints made from a

porcelain base and that's even used today. They'll either make blackboards still out of wood or also especially out of steel, like really thin steel in a way where that's lighter than wood is and more durable. And the Atlantic says that a modern chalkboard can last at least 15 years, usually more, before it wears down from use. And plus a beat-up chalkboard, you can still kind of use it. So these products then and now, they were a huge hit with schools, especially because the cost is tiny compared to what you get out of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, I guess schools have always been a sort of thing where it's like, eh, we don't want to spend that much money on the waifs.

Yeah, truly. Now and but especially then. One of the sources this week is a piece by Stephen D. Krause, rhetoric and writing professor at Eastern Michigan University. And he says that, especially in the 1800s, U.S. schools didn't have budgets as we think of them today. A lot of times it would be what did the community donate and what did the teacher personally construct? That's what we have. That's it. Right. I mean, you're saying that, but like in current day America, I feel like there are still teachers who are like, yeah, I buy all my own supplies and had to build a thing myself to bring to class. So it's changed, but in some ways it hasn't changed nearly enough.

Yeah, 100%. And so, yeah, that's part of the longevity of chalkboards, too. Like even if you're a teacher buying your own supplies, you really shouldn't have to. But also at least hopefully the chalk is cheap. Like it's cheaper than whiteboard markers or something. Yeah, I guess that's right. Well, yeah, maybe I hope it turns out that chalkboards are actually great for learning. That the super short answer is yes, chalkboards are useful for learning and, and do a useful thing. And we'll also talk about the goals of that, getting them

started after taking a short break. So stick with us and then we'll get into about the goals of that, getting them started after taking a short break. So stick with us, and then we'll get into how the chalkboard spread around the world. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

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Thank you, and remember, no running in the halls. And we're back with another takeaway for this show. And the takeaway is takeaway number two. The first classroom chalkboards supported a movement to mass-produce British education. Hmm. It turns out that on top of just thinking of this presentational approach, they also wanted to do a specific educational system that has mostly gone away, but the lingering effect of it is chalkboards. So they wanted to, like, standardize education and make it like reproducible? Yeah, this was it was not the government, but it was a British educator named Joseph Lancaster.

And then a lot of his rich friends who set up a society to spread it across Britain and also the rest of the world as much as they could. And this was the early 1800s. So there was a British empire, and they had a big reach. I see. But yeah, they wanted to standardize it and also make it so you could teach as many poor kids as possible for as little money as possible in the most efficient way you could. I mean, I trust rich people to know how to spend money on poor children, for sure. Especially Georgian or Victorian British people. Yeah, 1800s, good track record for what the wealthy thought of waifs.

This truly was waif-oriented. This was, again, his name is Joseph Lancaster in 1801. So right around the time wall chalkboards are coming about, he founds his own school in London to teach what he called the monitorial system. And the monitorial system was basically an approach to move beyond this one-room schoolhouse or not very active teaching where just whichever kids show up are copying lines and an adult is almost like a hall monitor or something. They're not doing a lot. They're there with a birch stick.

Yeah, truly. They were maybe there to hit kids and that was it. Yeah. Yeah. That used to be a thing. And of course, then and now, every teacher's different. There were probably some people trying to actively educate, but this guy, Joseph Lancaster, said, hey, what if we get like one really active teacher and then through a very efficient, very systematic system that I'm calling the monitorial system, they'll teach everybody, but like through some steps. So the system was you get one adult teacher and they handle a classroom of at least 200 students, potentially up to 1000 students. Wow. If people know about class sizes today, it's different, right? That's a lot of kids.

Yeah. I mean, also, I feel like class size does sort of track with the wealthiness of the school, generally speaking, especially when you're under the university level. Because like if you have a smaller classroom, you get more attention, which is generally seen as better. And usually the smaller classrooms are in wealthier school districts. And then if you're in a poorer school district, you have larger classrooms and you get less individual attention, which is generally seen as more challenging for learning. Yeah, that's right. And attention and time is both how this system came about and how it kind of went away as people wanting that attention and time for their kids. Because the real key to the system is you have one adult and up to a thousand

students, right? How would that work? What you do is you kind of turn the kids into little regiments. You sit the kids in rows of 10 and also you do some testing or judging or whatever beforehand to put one relatively advanced student in each row of 10. And then the system is the adult teaches toward all the smart kids. And then each row's smart kid after that teaches the rest of the row. Trickle down education. Yes. Yeah. It's a little hierarchy or pyramid or Ronald Reagan economics or something.

It is a pyramid scheme of educating. Those kids got to teach scheme of educating. Yeah. Like those kids got to teach their downstreams. Yeah. That, that is interesting because like on one hand, some education for poorer students is better than zero education, but I can't imagine this was, you know, the best method of teaching that many students. Also, I mean, like, how did they stop them from rioting? Because like you got you got your your waifs, but you also have the like little street urchins who are kind of streetwise and, you know, they could they could throw a brick at you. And apparently they would pay these higher ranking, smarter kids a little bit because

the kids were doing a little work. And then also they would pay a few other kids to either clean the room or like monitor for disciplinary stuff. Like there was a lot of almost like child labor within the otherwise well-intentioned attempt to get, like you said, like some education to poor kids. If they didn't do this, they'd probably get nothing. And so that was the hope. I am just imagining like a miniature constable, like in the whole constable outfit with the hat and the like blue coat with brass buttons and the nightstick.

But he's like, he's like seven years old. Like they look at the chalkboard to learn the phrase, what's all this then? And then they know how to shout that the phrase, what's all this then? Yeah. And then they know how to shout that in situations. What's all this then? Yeah. Yeah.

Classic British policing. So like solving the crime of a wedgie. And what was what was the problem with like getting more teachers? It was just like, we do not want we don't want to spend that money on these kids. We don't have the money. We don't want to spend that money. Yeah, it was budgetary. And then also, apparently across the 1800s, the US and Britain and some other countries

really started to get teaching colleges going and get more of a system to teach teachers going. But before this, that just wasn't that set up. They didn't have that many teachers. Yeah, like they didn't have that many teachers and teachers were relatively expensive to pay. And so they said, why don't we do this instead where we can kind of mass produce education for kids? And then the key to what they were mass producing was a very rigidly regimented curriculum. And it was entirely based on just rote memorization of lines of things.

And so they were looking for tools that let you present to a room of up to, again, a thousand kids. And so the chalkboard was immediately the solution. It's a single surface that costs money to set up, but then you can easily erase it and reuse it. And the chalk's relatively cheap. And so all these monitorial schools put up chalkboards. Right. Okay. And I mean, like for a class of like, if you have a thousand students, it must've been a pretty big chalkboard or the ones in the back are just kind of screwed. I think it's a mix of both. Yeah. Like I, as a glasses wearer starting, I think in first grade, I might've had a hard time or else I would have done a lot of like basketball style boxing out other kids to get in the front, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like I have mixed feelings about it because like,

yes, if you if that's the only way you can like get education out to the masses, OK, but clearly not the optimal way to learn. Yeah. And people realize that idea after a couple decades of these schools, because before these schools, it did seem like maybe the best option that was available. And also, it was something where wealthy people could say, I am getting more education to a whole bunch of kids, which is positive. And I'm doing it relatively efficiently, relatively cheaply, which saves me money. Like they could they felt good both ways about spreading it. Right. They like to do charity, but only if it's like a good bargain. And then this system thrived. Apparently Lancaster almost went broke trying to set up a bunch of these schools. So then a bunch of his wealthy friends formed a philanthropic society to do them.

Thousands of monitorial schools get founded in Britain and elsewhere. Lancaster then travels to the U.S. to promote them. He also travels to Simón Bolívar's Venezuela in South America to do it there, too. But within a few decades, these start to go away because people say, OK, this is a step toward better teaching, but let's train more teachers. Let's do smaller classes. We also developed the idea of grouping kids by age. Oh, so this was like a thousand students from like three to 17? Yeah, like maybe not that big, but kind of, yeah. Imagine if the three-year-old is assigned the constable and is having to like lay down the law on the 17-year-old. signed the constable and it's happened to like lay down the law on the 17 year old.

You're under arrest. You're under arrest for first degree swirly on me that you just did on me. Yeah. Cause like, cause it's better to have, you know, like grades by age and target the teaching that way. But before these monitorial schools, it might've been a oneroom schoolhouse where it is all the kids lumped together, you know? And so this seemed like not a downgrade to just do a much bigger room of all the kids together. Right, right. It's so weird. And so then all these different upgrades to education happen, but the chalkboard remains super popular. And apparently one of the key citations for people doing the history of this is a teaching manual from 1841 where a teacher says the chalkboard, quote, deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not among the greatest benefactors of mankind, end quote. Wow. And so as like all of education progresses and

revolutionizes and turns into a more advanced thing, people keep putting up chalkboards. They say like, oh, this presentational style of teaching that used to be one adult to the smart kids down to the other kids in the monitorial system. We can just also keep using a chalkboard for better education. Yeah. I feel using a chalkboard for better education. Yeah, I feel like a chalkboard in a class where you've got a good teacher that's paying attention to you and your developmental needs can be an extremely useful tool. Yeah. And there's one more takeaway for this main episode, and it is about one kind of the one last big change within chalkboards beyond just this general thing of spreading them all over the place.

Takeaway number three. Blackboards turned green in the mid-1900s. Oh. And that color change also might keep them relevant into the future. Now, I'm assuming this was not a spontaneous thing of a haunted blackboard suddenly turning green and oozing, right? I'm like, our key sources today are Slimer, obviously. Slimer knows everything about this.

He did it. We made these blackboards out of radium for your children. Come up, kids. Give it a lick. We made these blackboards out of radium for your children. Come up, kids. Give it a lick. Yeah, it's a very small change, and I had never thought about it, but almost all the chalkboards when I was growing up were green.

Huh. And when this item started out, it was black or a super dark gray, often because that's the color that slate stone is. Starting in the 1930s, and especially by the 1960s, U.S. classrooms switched to green boards for the most part. It turns out it's a glare thing. Black has a lot more glare on it. Mental Floss says that, especially once we reached the 1900s, fewer and fewer blackboards were made of stone because they started out black because that's the color slate is.

But as production ramped up, and especially of steel production, manufacturers were making their boards from painted wood or metal. And so once you're doing that, the paint can be whatever color. And they figured out that if they made the paint a dark green, that was way less glare than a blackboard.

And teachers could look at it all day more comfortably. Oh, okay. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Like green was the optimal color there was like brown, wasn't it? Puce wasn't any good? Mauve? No? Yeah, I don't know how they experimented this out. And it's hard to tell if it was a teacher idea given to a manufacturer or a manufacturer thinking of it, and then teachers said yes. But there's a lot of ways a black chalkboard totally works well, especially because you can see white chalk or light chalk very easily on it. And dark green did that same thing, but also there was a lot less glare. It was the best of both worlds.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. The other part of this change is that, you know, a few teachers said, hey, there's less glare on my dark green chalkboard. But a lot of teachers or especially administrators just didn't think about it. And with the turnover of about every 15, 20 years needing to replace a chalkboard, green chalkboards took over U.S. schools because just they started making them green in the 1930s. And then as the life cycle of chalkboards happened, they just got replaced by this green kind because it was time. Right. So a lot of chalkboard color is accidental almost, you know.

It's interesting because like when I'm looking at the green chalkboard, it looks so natural to me. It just, it almost doesn't register. Because like when you said they turned green, I was like, I don't remember green chalkboards. Now that I'm looking at it, yes, it was green. It was just so, such a, such a ubiquitous dark green that it didn't even register as green to me. It was just like, that's chalkboard color. That's a neutral chalkboard color. Yeah, this just extremely subtly happened. And it led to a few knock on effects. And one is that we invented the word chalkboard, more or less. Maybe people had said that before, but these were all called black boards starting out because they were black. And so once they weren't black, people who did notice that the

board was green said, it's weird to call this a blackboard. Wait a minute. You promised me a blackboard. And then like, it's like this little urchin throwing bricks at the teacher. Like, you said it was a blackboard. You lied to me. I've got rickets, but I can still throw rocks. Oh, I was going to ask if the urchin is better fed than the waif, right? I want to know their stats and their strength. I think the, so the urchin, yeah. So the urchin is definitely more, the urchin may still have rickets, but the urchin is a little more wiry, more sinewy, can accomplish more physical feats than the waif. The waif is more of a, you know, just sort of like has the density sort of a leaf.

Yeah, when I'm tabletop role playing school, I like to be a tank so i'm an urchin every time i'm always an urchin now i want to do like a dnd campaign where you all have to play as dickensian orphans and get through like industrial england that i mean it's just a very good idea. Hey, network, send this over to the Adventure Zone. Pass it along. Dungeons and Oigubs. Man, I just, like, my mind is writing a character sheet for an Artful Dodger, and it's really

fun. My character's name is Pickles and they smoke and they are three years old. Oh, is it because we just did a Pickles episode recently? Is that why? Maybe. That could be. Oh, and we're thinking about the color green. It's all coming together. It's all one universe. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I can't, I can't escape the pickle. It's all in one universe. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

I can't escape the pickle. Yeah, and this green shift, you start to have these called chalkboards and seen that way. I also got curious about the emoji art because there's not a chalkboard emoji, but there is a teacher emoji, which is just an adult in front of a chalkboard. And most tech companies make that a green board, but the WhatsApp emoji is a blackboard because just both these varieties exist. And the blackboard is almost kind of a more antique way, but that's the only difference, like culturally. That's so interesting that things like that stick around so long. Like it's involved in the teacher emoji, whereas like most kids, right. Probably have never used a blackboard. I'm sure they're, I'm sure they are familiar with chalkboards, but, um, and I'm sure like there are chalkboards still in use in schools. Uh, but it's like, I think the

more common experience is, is whiteboards. And yet we still kind of have that as a symbol of schools, kind of like how Apple, like apples were a symbol of like, you bring your teacher an apple. I never did that. Not even once. Right. Yeah, never. And yet as a child, like the apple on the teacher's desk was like a thing, very symbolic thing. And it still is. And I don't think anyone for like at least 100 years has ever given a teacher an apple. Correct me if I'm wrong, though. I had the exact same apple experience. I was like, I guess that is some Andy Griffith show stuff or something.

Like this is some black and white images, the past of how you treat teachers, because they don't need me to bring them a produce item. They can just go to the store. It's really I'm sure they would appreciate the dollar or two of value, but they can just get that for themselves. They don't need it. Yeah, because I guess that would be like a thing, right? Like if you have a one a one house schoolhouse and you're you've got your local teacher your mom sends you to the teacher and like hey give your teacher we have some peaches give your teacher some peaches like yeah and i think that's maybe what the apple thing is i don't you know yeah it's a symbol of

broader community like the community scraping stuff together for a school teacher in the 1800s. Yeah. Have we ever, have we ever, we haven't done an apples episode, have we? No, it's as we tape, it's in the poll, the latest poll for people picking topics, but because we've never done apples and it'd be great. Yeah. Yeah. So the, the last, last thing with this chalkboard color thing involves Japan, because Japan is one indicator that the switch to green chalkboards might help keep chalkboard technology going into the future and give it a role. Because green is very comfortable for our eyes as colors go.

And in the very first number, we talked about whiteboards replacing chalkboards. first number, we talked about whiteboards replacing chalkboards. And like we've been saying, kids listening to this might be like, why are they doing out of topic on this antique thing I've never seen in the world, a chalkboard. But the magazine, The Atlantic, they say that Japan is one country that really hasn't made the widespread whiteboard switch. As of a few years ago, about 75% of Japanese K through 12 classrooms still had chalkboards. And apparently the reason is that not only is a dark green chalkboard comfier than a black chalkboard, they also think it might be more psychologically comfortable than that harsh white, like that stark white of a whiteboard. Yeah. And, you know, everybody's mileage varies with that, but the analog green chalkboard might have a role in our psychological and visual comfort going forward, even though it's not as advanced as other stuff.

That's really interesting. I wonder if you could like do something like a chalkboard and then do sort of the liquid chalk on the chalkboard so you don't get the chalk dust, but then you get the benefit of the green chalkboard. Or like a, could you do a, I mean, this sounds weird, but a green whiteboard. So it's whiteboard, but made out of green. And then you have some kind of lighter pins on it. I don't know. I'm not very good at like pins technology, but it seems like you could do it. You're not a panologist. Hang on. I was promised. It's like that dark mode stuff we were talking about. I don't know if digital whiteboards can switch to a dark green mode, but maybe that already exists if I Google around. And if it doesn't exist, it would be so easy to program. You can just do that.

Yeah. Yeah. My, my vision of many iPads stapled together is coming to fruition. Like the inventor of the chalkboard. They were like, give me all your writing slates. I'm putting them up. That's what happened. That's great. Yeah. Maybe I'm a Luddite, but I kind of like the idea of having something that is not digital and is sort of more just like physical stuff. I don't know, like chalk on a chalkboard for the brain and the eyes to just look at something. It's kind of like how I feel about like physical books where I'm, I have no issue with like digital readers, um, you know, the tablet reading or, or whatever, but it's also nice to just kind of have a physical book. Cause there's something restful about something not being digital, where it's just like, your brain is just like,

I am limited to the pages in this book. And so there's no internet to like haunt me. Yeah. Maybe the upshot is it's nice to just have more and more tools exist. Yeah. Chalkboards are one that we made a bajillion of and still have in many cases. And so, you know, it's good that they work for what they do. And you can draw really good Garfields on chalkboards. There's nothing like it.

Ooh. You can use your finger. What you do is you use your fingers to blend the colors together, too, so you can get really nice shading on Garfield's characteristic heavy-lidded eyes. Like, a hundred years from now, they're opening up the ceiling of your place. And it's this Sistine Garfield on the ceiling. They're like, wow. The Sistine Garfield.

Chalkboards were amazing. Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the first classroom chalkboard was probably a bunch of handheld writing slates stuck together on a wall. Takeaway number two, the first classroom chalkboards supported the monitorial system, a movement to mass-produce British education. And takeaway number three, blackboards turned green in the mid-1900s, and that color change might help keep chalkboards relevant into the future. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode, because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now, if you support this show at MaximumFun.org.

Members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the chalkboard gags on The Simpsons and their surprising function as a time capsule. Visit SIFPod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of almost 12 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of Maximum Fun bonus shows. It is special audio just for members. Thank you for being somebody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include JSTOR Daily, The Atlantic, a book called

Blackboard, A Personal History of the Classroom by University of San Francisco MFA writing teacher Louis Busby, and digital resources from the Museum of Teaching and Learning in Fullerton, California, and the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And hey, join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life.

We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 125. That's a recent one. That's about the topic of ball bearings. Turns out the Germans and the British each tried to knock each other out of World War II

by wrecking each other's ball bearing supply chains specifically. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that?

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