Why is chalkboard green

But today, many school children might not be familiar with either blackboards or "greenboards. According to The Atlantic , at the turn of the millennium, whiteboards were outselling chalkboards by a 4-to-1 ratio. And some schools are rediscovering blackboards, literally. In the summer of , construction workers renovating an Oklahoma school for smart whiteboards found two historic slate blackboards that still bore drawings from almost years ago.

Have you got a Big Question you'd like us to answer? Reports of the discovery spotlighted the chalk, acknowledging the blackboards merely as surfaces for the drawings. But slate blackboards, and the green chalkboards that replaced them, are themselves relics of a bygone era. Even small schools in rural communities, like the elementary school I attended in Nebraska in the s, have exchanged chalkboards for whiteboards and interactive Smart Boards.

No matter how young, most parents today still conjure the image of a chalkboard when they imagine a K classroom. In popular culture, chalkboards are a visual shorthand for school.

They appear in stock photography accompanying articles about education and in movies and television shows set in schools. By the end of the s, whiteboards outsold chalkboards by a margin of up to four to one. Even digital whiteboards—computerized display boards with interactive features— outsold chalkboards by the turn of the millennium.

Since then, chalkboards have all but disappeared from schools. Why, then, do they remain such potent symbols for education? In the early s, slate blackboards represented change.

For centuries, students had used handheld tablets of wood or slate. When the Scottish educational reformer James Pillans became the rector of Edinburgh High School, in , his use of a blackboard was revolutionary.

He explains in an memoir, Contributions to the Cause of Education :. I placed before my pupils, instead of a crowded and perplexing map, a large black board, having an unpolished non-reflecting surface, on which was inscribed in bold relief a delineation of the country, with its mountains, rivers, lakes, cities, and towns of note.

The delineation was executed with chalks of different colours. By the midth century, blackboards were in common use. As is the case for all technology, they came with a learning curve. Due to their simplicity, effectiveness, economy and ease of use, the simple blackboard and its cousin the whiteboard have substantial advantages over any number of more-complex modern technologies.

Blackboard classroom history begins, in rudimentary form, in ancient times. Students in ancient Babylonia and Sumeria inscribed their lessons on clay tablets with a stylus predecessor to the pen and pencil in cuneiform writing.

These could be used wet and erased to be used again, or baked to create a permanent document. In India in the 11th century, teachers used something similar to personal blackboards in their lessons. Manufacturers saw how important they were and by , giant pieces of slate were being shipped to American and European schools.

The color change came in the s, when companies sold steel plates coated with green porcelain-based enamel instead of the traditional dark slate. The new material was lighter and less fragile than the first blackboards, so they were cheaper to ship and more likely to survive the journey. Plus, the enamel left less of a glare and the color was nicer to look at. Despite their advantages, learn the scientific reason the sound of nails on chalkboard is so annoying.

Most schools use whiteboards with erasable marker, and at least 60 percent of teachers even have access to Smart Boards that let them write on a projected computer display. Looking for more education trivia? Find out why apples are associated with teachers.

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