Third, there was imposed upon us a baffling new nomenclature. This frightening change made everything we were to study seem like an unfamiliar subject. Arithmetic had become “mathematics,” and the word provoked an immediate mental image for me: a tightly wound spring, straining, powerful, dangerous. Reading had become “literature,” and there was considerable disagreement about how we were even supposed to pronounce it. Science had become “general science,” suggesting something vaster than science alone, as if everything we had studied so far had been confined to a small corner of a huge map now being fully unfolded for the first time.
The blackboards of the old school were absent from the Purlieu Street School. In their place were devices much like them—extensive flat things mounted on the walls, meant for writing—but these were green. What were we supposed to call them? Greenboards? Green blackboards? Why had this change come about? The official explanation was that yellow chalk on a green board would be easier on our eyes. To Raskol, that seemed unlikely. “They’re trying to confuse us,” he said, and he sighed and shook his head slowly, as if his suspicions about the true purpose of school had finally been confirmed by these green blackboards. (Years would pass before chalkboard became the general term, and during the intervening period of uncertainty the nation’s youth, innocent victims of a summertime revolution in the technology of wall-mounted writing surfaces, sat puzzled through millions of student hours pretending to listen to geography and geometry but unable to stop asking themselves, “What the heck should I call that thing on the wall?”
In the years since that time, I have found myself repeating Raskol’s assessment more and more frequently, in more and more settings. When I arrive at an airport, for example, frantic and sweaty, certain that I’ve missed my flight, and a smiling young woman in the uniform of the airline tells me that snow flurries at an airport half a continent away mean that my flight won’t be leaving for two hours, Raskol appears before me, just as he was in the seventh grade. He shakes his head, he sighs, he holds his hands out in helplessness. “See?” he says. “They’re trying to confuse you.”)
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 578, Mark Dorset considers Education: Equipment for: Blackboards (Chalkboards) from this episode.
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