Remember those days in school when a stick of chalk might come whizzing past your head because of some cheeky student near the back.
Well, that was never me…but it might be argued that I was occasionally next to that person and had been involved…somehow…!
You don’t see chalk boards very much any more.
I still have a fondness for them though. They were ever present from my childhood and all the way through University. And when I finished my education and started teaching others, I found myself in front of a chalkboard with a class full of students.
I remember teaching classes while another class was going on across the wall. There was one particular instructor that I could always identify just by listening. If he was teaching in the classroom on the opposite side of the wall, it sounded like bullets hitting the board. I actually had him as an instructor about 15 years before I found myself teaching in the same faculty, and it was sort of funny to listen to his chalk hit the board in that old familiar hammering style.
I always wondered if he ever turned around to see if his class was absorbing or understanding anything that he was hammering onto that chalkboard, or if the students even had time to engage because they were so busy copying everything down before he picked up the chalk brush and swept it all away.
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