The Simple Genius of the Blackboard
Oct. 18th, 2014 11:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charisstomaFrom a teacher friend doing higher studies, in another place, not here.
The Simple Genius of the Blackboard: Why the board-centered classroom is still the best place to teach and learn.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/10/a_history_of_the_blackboard_how_the_blackboard_became_an_effective_and_ubiquitous.html
In an early class discussion on the history of the novel, I frequently bring up Stendhal’s phrase “the mirror in the roadway,” which the critic Frank O’Connor uses to describe the form of the novel. For me this phrase is key to understanding that a novel is about the journey of its characters, but a journey that is also a reflection of the world through which the characters pass. The mirror in the roadway is a strange but effective metaphor, yet I cannot do it justice with words alone. So I get up and draw a roadway, and a mirror in that roadway, and moving toward that mirror, a wagonload of characters. I’m not a draftsman, and unless I tell you what I’m drawing on the board, you would never know there was a horse-drawn wagon, much less a mirror or a roadway.
Once I start on the board, I often can’t stop and continue to add phrases, strange pictures, the titles of books, sometimes just marks, a kind of visual punctuation. The ham of my left hand will be covered with red or blue or green dry-erase marker by the end of the evening, and when I stand back to look over what I’ve written, nothing makes any sense. My board work looks more like a foreign language than literary criticism. But it’s still effective board work. I’ve been able to draw connections; I’ve been able to drive home key points. I’ve made the students look beyond me, themselves, and our little room.
Excerpted from Blackboard: A Personal History of the Classroom. Copyright © 2014 by Lewis Buzbee. Reproduced with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
The Simple Genius of the Blackboard: Why the board-centered classroom is still the best place to teach and learn.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/10/a_history_of_the_blackboard_how_the_blackboard_became_an_effective_and_ubiquitous.html
In an early class discussion on the history of the novel, I frequently bring up Stendhal’s phrase “the mirror in the roadway,” which the critic Frank O’Connor uses to describe the form of the novel. For me this phrase is key to understanding that a novel is about the journey of its characters, but a journey that is also a reflection of the world through which the characters pass. The mirror in the roadway is a strange but effective metaphor, yet I cannot do it justice with words alone. So I get up and draw a roadway, and a mirror in that roadway, and moving toward that mirror, a wagonload of characters. I’m not a draftsman, and unless I tell you what I’m drawing on the board, you would never know there was a horse-drawn wagon, much less a mirror or a roadway.
Once I start on the board, I often can’t stop and continue to add phrases, strange pictures, the titles of books, sometimes just marks, a kind of visual punctuation. The ham of my left hand will be covered with red or blue or green dry-erase marker by the end of the evening, and when I stand back to look over what I’ve written, nothing makes any sense. My board work looks more like a foreign language than literary criticism. But it’s still effective board work. I’ve been able to draw connections; I’ve been able to drive home key points. I’ve made the students look beyond me, themselves, and our little room.
Excerpted from Blackboard: A Personal History of the Classroom. Copyright © 2014 by Lewis Buzbee. Reproduced with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
