Day 30 (at last!): Pobject's blackboard

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get to writing this last piece for the project. I think it’s a little bit of “I don’t want this to end” and a little bit of “this one’s really close to home,” given that much of my life has been spelled out on blackboards for the past god-knows-how-many years. As a mathematician, it kind of comes with the trade.

There was a time when I would have told you that the blackboard was a sacred space, and every symbol placed on it a hieroglyph with deep and recondite meaning. As the classroom itself exuded an aura of numinousness, the blackboard, if you leaned near enough to it, would smell of ozone, would pulse and vibrate, would be hot to the touch.

I once write several draft chapters of a magical realist novella in which the central figure was a fair-to-middlin’ mathematics graduate student who experienced a blow on the head after falling from a table he’d climbed upon at the front of class. After the accident, he acquired the ability to simply see to the heart of any mathematical proof, like Will Hunting on a peyote trip. The story was narrated by another grad student, not quite so bright as the first, who struggled mightily to understand everything, and he was enviously aweful of his friend’s new talent: everything mathy came easy to the guy. However, the savant soon lost his passion for doing math because it was now an effortless enterprise, and he envied his still-normal friend’s dedication to the craft.

A morality play about the dangers of truth manifest?

Maybe I’m making too much of it.

I don’t feel that energy, that electricity, when I’m at the board these days. (And I spend less time at the board, and write less on it, than I once did.) It’s simple surface, a clean clay slip. It receives only what it’s given, and has no inherent mysteries of its own. It’s pure potential. In this it mirrors us, little mirrors ourselves, giving and taking as we bounce around the world trying to make sense of it all.

No energy, no electricity, but something stronger, truer, real: if I put my face on the cold fake slate, I can hear echoes of myself, and echoes of my students, and of anyone else who’s ever put their thoughts there. Murmurs of meaning, nonsense, insights, epiphanies. It’s all there. It’s all inside of us. At the end of the day, we are all we have.

Blackboard

Nine Eleven in Room Three Zero One

Adam Shepard looked at me – a fresh man,

His ebony skin still smooth, free of scars and tattoos –

Jejune eyes broad – mouth slack in excited fright.

His small frame had carried the weight of five

Firemen into my classroom since day one.

“It just fell.  It’s just gone.”

My own eyes had been somewhere else –

Processing what had begun as another day

In the bubble of the first classroom I could call

Mine.  Looking at the grade book, attempting to

Understand how those numbers translated into

Students. Reading the date I had written on the chalkboard

That morning.  Wandering out the horizontal window,

Away from that moment.  Anywhere but here.

I do know my eyes were not on the small

Box, perched like a caged yellow bird in the corner of the

Room.  I shuddered and wondered if I should turn it off.

Now a familiar picture to us all, as

The first building fell, dust flew up, like clapping

Blackboard erasers.  Nothing seemed in synch. 

The whole world knew more than we did.  And the whole

World knows more than we did.

Day 4: Lobject's blackboard

My earliest experiences of playing teacher during summers between elementary school involved smooth rectangle chalkboards full of possibility. I enjoyed the act of writing on them. The crisp white lines on the black background seemed to me the most perfect combination, and I often wondered why books weren’t printed white text on dark black paper. I thought I’d publish my books like that and everyone would be shocked at how much sense it made. They’d want to copy me. This would be my great contribution to the literary world.  

Even then, though, as much as I enjoyed composing worksheets and assigning colored star stickers, the best part of school was having parades around Balmoral Circle. The street was safe for red wagons, shiny bicycles, pink and blue streamers—the colorful, mobile school supplies I cherished most.

I see this now in my teaching tools and methods: the bright whiteboard markers that line the bottom of last year’s CCCCs tote bag; the multimodal presentations I create for classes and workshops lined with well-placed colors, images, and videos; the color-coded sample argumentative paper outlines I filled my classroom’s whiteboard canvas with just last week.     

And my writing center holds two of the last blackboards on campus. These green squares are centered prominently on back walls near my office.  Five years ago when I started the writing center and first saw my space, I wanted to remove the chalkboards in favor of white walls I could fill like a scrapbook. As it turns out, the removing the boards would also remove the walls and the chalkboards aren’t actually chalkboards at all. I had to use special markers to write on them, and it takes water and more strength than I possess to erase the boards. I know this because years ago I selected writing-related quotes for each board. When I wanted a change, I didn’t get past removing the quotes off one board, keeping the quotes on the board opposite my office. Every day I am glad I carefully selected the remaining quotes. Students stand in front of the board staring. They read the quotes aloud. They look at me. “I get it.” I think these words inspire writers to revise, edit, and continue writing. The words are fading. I hope to outlast them.

My favorite quote is James Michener’s “I’m not a good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.” In this quote I find the beauty of the blackboard/whiteboard/rewriteboard: the ability to easily erase and revise, explore, reconsider, and start fresh. These possibilities are the very things I strive to instill in writers, in my own writing, and in my life.