Blackboards vs whiteboards

My 2nd grade teacher (I swear she was somehow the prototype for Dolores Umbridge) was insanely obsessed with handwriting, perfect D'Nelian handwriting. She would take out the middle two to make lines on the chalkboard to either demonstrate what we should be doing or have us practice on the chalkboard. She was brutal too. Perfection or nothing.

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InfamousCantaloupe38@reddit

They made ambidextrous folk pick a hand back then also. Counting materials were also these plastic click-together mini block things in primary colors.

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SwissCheese4Collagen@reddit

I was probably closest to ambidexterity in school, we were 99% right-handed. My best friend was our only lefty in grade school and when I tried the lefty scissors in first grade, it hurt my right hand so badly I was counting my lucky stars I had righty scissors to use. I realized later that of course the lefty scissors would hurt my right hand, they were backwards from what my hand needed. Even later I realized our teacher had been the realest for having a whole box of lefty scissors among the boxes of righty ones.

Somewhat ironically, I do hold my pen and write like I'm left-handed but in my right hand. Someone noticed when I was doing their taxes because their SO did the same thing.

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TrixieBastard@reddit

This thing would invariably squeak horribly

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Bajadasaurus@reddit

It was horrific 😭

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InfamousCantaloupe38@reddit

This made me roll. 🤣

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one-small-plant@reddit

Music class!!

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Bajadasaurus@reddit

I CRINGED SO HARD JUST NOW

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brucecampbellschins@reddit

Every good boy deserves fudge?

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dorky2@reddit

It's every good boy deserves cake I think.

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addledlittledoodle3@reddit

They sure do! But it’s EfGaBcDeF. So they gotta have fudge instead

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dorky2@reddit

Got it, thank you!

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TrixieBastard@reddit

Every good boy deserves fudge
For all, cake exists

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melissisms@reddit

My teachers were less about positive reinforcement I guess. We learned, “Every Good Boy Does Fine.”

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CraftsandChaos@reddit

We got "Every Girl Buys Diamonds Friday."

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TrixieBastard@reddit

FACE

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Face88888888@reddit

Yes?

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TrixieBastard@reddit

Hi!

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morrisboris@reddit

And when one would fall off and it would scrape

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DoveOnTheInternet@reddit

By the time I got to highschool our director's board used thin strips of electrical tape.

It gave him more chalk to throw at us when we blew past a rest.

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melissisms@reddit

Ours threw pencils.

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Tall-Introduction414@reddit

Ah, music class.

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blacktrufflesheep@reddit

Ta, Ta, TiTi Ta, (rest) (rest)

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Tall-Introduction414@reddit

Titty titty tatas, indeed.

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blacktrufflesheep@reddit

Ta, Ta, TiTi Ta, (breast) (breast)

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PuppyJakeKhakiCollar@reddit

I can hear this picture and it's making my teeth hurt.

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Blackbird136@reddit

Mmmm. As a person with a music degree, I loved getting to college when in the theory classrooms, the staff was PERMANENT on the whiteboard! 🥰

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Cutthechitchata-hole@reddit

I forgot about this. Music is so close to math i guess i was traumatized

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Anieya@reddit

Found the music kid

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Govain@reddit

Man, I hated music class.

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flatulating_ninja@reddit

gif

If Bart had one his punishments would have taken 20% the time. I'm pretty sure there was an episode where Lisa had this punishment and Nelson told her to use that.

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Slytherpuffy@reddit

Yep. My music teacher had one!

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imnottheoneipromise@reddit

Also overhead projectors where you had the transparent sheets that the teacher could write on or where already typed up that projected onto the wall so everyone could see and write down notes. Kept the teacher from spending half the class writing on the chalkboard. The moved to the digital projectors I think in high school or maybe college

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spuldup@reddit

I had blackboards through high school, and whiteboards in college.

I began to fall behind around 6th or 7th grade because I couldn't see the chalk on the blackboard, and was usually in the back of class due to having a last name near the end of the alphabet. Turns out I just needed glasses.

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Traditional_Entry183@reddit

I didn't see a dry erase board until I was in college, and even then there were still a lot of chalkboard used.

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jambr380@reddit

We only ever had chalkboards. I was a teacher right out of college and got to use the cool, new whiteboards. And now everybody has a smartboard

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Bajadasaurus@reddit

Same here. And all of ours were green, which was disappointing. The black was a more pleasing aesthetic to me due to the increased contrast between the board and the chalk.

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whyneedaname77@reddit

The whiteboard made me so much cleaner. No more chalk on my pants.

The new smart boards are great.

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seanie_rocks@reddit

I specifically remember going outside to clap the chalkboard erasers out during detention.

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NotMe739@reddit

In elementary school we had a eraser cleaning machine in one of the hallways. It had a couple spindles that spun super fast that you rubbed the eraser back and forth on. The machine looked pretty ancient and probably wasn't the safest thing for kids to do with no supervision.

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fictionalbandit@reddit

An eraser cleaning machine?! Damn someone went to private school lol

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NotMe739@reddit

Nope, just a well funded public school. Part way through childhood my parents went promotion chasing and moved us from one of the best funded public school systems to one of the worst funded public school systems in the state. Gee thanks mom and dad. First school had an eraser cleaner. Second school didn't even have computers (in the late 90s).

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dorky2@reddit

I went to private school (thanks grandpa!) and we did not have that!

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cupcakebean@reddit

I commented that in a different thread. We had one too! It was more like a vacuum that you ran the erasers over.

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KitchenNazi@reddit

Detention?? It was a reward for us - we got to clap erasers while everyone was inside learning.

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S_A_R_K@reddit

mesothelioma intensifies

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saison257@reddit

Came here to say this, although for us, it wasn't detention. It was part of our classroom duties and we rotated assignments every week. I always LOVED when it was my turn to go outside and get out of the classroom to clap the erasers. Absolutely hated all the chalk that got all over my hands and face and clothes but we wore it like a badge of honor bc we got to skip 10 minutes of class at the end of the day.

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alvinofdiaspar@reddit

You traded chalk with VOCs.

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cupcakebean@reddit

I'm a teacher and have never had a smartboard.

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MrSuzyGreenberg@reddit

I’m an art teacher who went from white board and overhead projector to smart board and I fucking hate it. Smart boards are way less convenient than a whiteboard and projector.

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jambr380@reddit

Smartboards are a little weird. They just don't have the precision of an actual writing utensil. I can see that being frustrating for an art teacher specifically

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MrSuzyGreenberg@reddit

Delayed writing, not magnetic so I can’t pin things to it, can’t project and trace, it’s about 1/2 the size, if you don’t have the proper pen it’s practically worthless. I now just put a white screen up and draw on it w dry erase markers (IT guy isn’t too happy about that).

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InfidelZombie@reddit

Yeah I don't think I saw a whiteboard until I got my first job after grad school in 2005.

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Wild-Sky-4807@reddit

Yeah, I didn't have a whiteboard until college. And even then it wasn't in all the classrooms.

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IamGoingtoBundyland@reddit

I teach. I am not a fan of whiteboards. So much plastic created and thrown away.

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jcstrat@reddit

I never saw a white board until I joined the army.

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Pharmacy_Duck@reddit

So my first and middle schools only had whiteboards, but when I went up to secondary school, they still had blackboards, and that gave it a bit more academic "weight" to me, like they were sticking to something traditional and that somehow indicated more respect for the institution. In reality, it was probably just the case that they were strapped for cash, and saving money wherever they could!

My maths teacher was a crack shot with a blackboard rubber. He could quite accurately *not" hit a talking kid at the back of the class, quite often without even looking. It was like some ninja feat that was only taught to teachers after a certain amount of years in the job. We were terrified of him, but he was genuinely decent to the kids that actually wanted to learn.

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Turbojelly@reddit

I remebwr blackboards changing to whiteboards. I also started working IT Support when we went from whiteboards to interactive boards and, more recently, interactive boards to interactive screens.

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masingen@reddit

I don't remember ever having chalkboards in school. I do, however, remember my history teacher in high school talking about how our kids would probably grow up only knowing about whiteboards because computers were probably going to become so integral to classrooms that the chalk dust would become a problem for them.

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tossitintheroundfile@reddit

I am in Norway - and take an evening adult language class that is held at a local school. They have smart projectors but also still actual chalkboards.

My brain did a double take the first few sessions I was there to see the teacher writing in chalk and then erasing everything afterwards. Now it just seems normal (again).

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Mego0427@reddit

We never had whiteboards, just chalkboards. Remember the pulldown maps that were all outdated and still included the Soviet Union? My old AP found one in the storage at the middle school we worked at and hung it in her office.

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ButterscotchAware402@reddit

I'll see your chalkboard and raise you an overhead projector. When's the last time a kid got to experience the trippy visuals of their teacher spritzing the overhead projector to clean it while it was still on?

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Stratospheric-Ferret@reddit

Kids these days also didn't get the benefit of being able to use the OHP to trace work they were supposed to be replicating in technical drawing classes.

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Dickrubin14094@reddit

I graduated high school in 98 and the first whiteboard I saw was during my freshman year of college a few months later.

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cordelaine@reddit

We had green ones, and I had no idea why they were sometimes called blackboards. We usually said chalkboards.

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FoppyRETURNS@reddit

Some blackboards are green 🙃

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IndomitableAnyBeth@reddit

Or brown.

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cordelaine@reddit

Oh man, I forgot about the brown ones. Didn’t see as many of those.

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FiveCrappedPee@reddit

Fuck now my head is spinning. I know that some were black I remember but also yeah I remember now the green ones. Wtf this is some mental shit I need a nap now.

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toespreadermagic@reddit

I remember my third grade teacher pointing out that once a week the custodians washed the chalkboard which turned them black and once you started erasing things they turned green.

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ViceroyFizzlebottom@reddit

We cleaned ours. Clap the erasers outside, wash the blackboards at the end of the week

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lavasca@reddit

Ours let us clean them. We were obsessed and she was wise.

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Treadingresin@reddit

My elementary school had a mix of both, so you would get used to seeing the older blackboard, then go into a room with the updated green one, or vice versa, and it would be a bit jarring.

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Remarkable_Term631@reddit

And they'd write differently too. I remember the green ones seemed smoother and squeaker. I liked writing on blackboards better.

Or I just made that up. It popped into my head when I read this so it triggered something.

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cupcakebean@reddit

The green ones definitely were different. I always thought it was because they were part of these metallic walls in some of our classrooms, but they were probably just made of a different material than the older blackboards. The green ones were squeakier and didn't write as well.

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ViceroyFizzlebottom@reddit

The blackboards in my elementary school were black slate chalkboards

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Silly-Shoulder-6257@reddit

Come to think of it, many of us had chalk/black boards in our rooms so we could play “school”.

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jbenze@reddit

I remember when they switched to green. I know it was supposed to be easier than the eyes but yellow on green was way harder to read than white on black.

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Azuras_Star8@reddit

I heard my grandmother, back in the 1980s, say they were black when they were kids, and the name never changed until we called them "chalkboards".

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tlivingd@reddit

They were originally slate. A very dark gray

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nullpassword@reddit

If you are really, really old, they were called slates. If you are a vampire I guess they called em waxed tablets.

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Blackbird136@reddit

I also said chalkboard. I remember my mom using the term blackboard and I thought she was old. 😂

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Poison_Ivy_Rorschach@reddit

We had eraser duty in 3-5th grade. You got to use the machine in the janitor’s “office” to clean all the classroom erasers. Everyone wanted to get picked, because you got out of class for about 15 before the bell. We had a mix of blackboards and whiteboards in 7th-8th grade. I think the school was slowly transforming each room. My 7th grade math teacher had a whiteboard, but my 8th grade math teacher had a blackboard. He always had chalk marks all over his pants. He also wore a bad toupee. It’s weird what we remember.

I still remember a mixture in high school, but I moved in 10th grade and my new school had all whiteboards, but the music and art departments kept chalkboards on wheels that they could push between rooms.

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MonstersMamaX2@reddit

I did my student teaching in spring 2006 and the school I was student teaching in only had chalkboards. And my first classrooms had chalkboards as well. Personally I love a white board and a doc cam more than anything else. I’ll take that over a smart board every single day

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DeuceOfDiamonds@reddit

Oh, definitely. I remember my fifth-grade teacher was constantly covered in chalk dust because she would always wipe her hands on her dress. Became a running joke in our class.

And yeah, high school was when the transition to whiteboards was pretty much complete. The smell of those markers is ingrained in my brain to this day.

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Balthierlives@reddit

I don’t think I ever saw a white board once in school. Even undergrad was still chalkboards.

When I went to grad school it was all what boards and PowerPoint presentations though. I remember it feeling so different. Mostly in a good way. Chalkboards were a mess and overhead projectors weren’t much better.

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star_b_nettor@reddit

Chalk boards and later overhead projectors. No white boards in school though.

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SanchoPliskin@reddit

This bad boy was in every classroom!

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ViceroyFizzlebottom@reddit

I’m curious who called them ELMOs?

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d-wail@reddit

ELMOs were the webcam style, so you could put a regular paper/book down and project it.

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LacyKnits@reddit

ELMO was different than a regular overhead. (At least for me).

High school had standard overheads with transparencies and the markers.

College had ELMOs. They were able to project the image of opaque items - like the open text book, or notebook pages with handwritten solutions to math homework.

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SanchoPliskin@reddit

We called them E.T.!!!

gif

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ChiMara777@reddit

Oh yes I remember overhead projectors!

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theoptimusdime@reddit

I learned beginning C++ by a old hippie writing code on an overhead projector in highschool...

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toasterb@reddit

Same. I seem to remember only having whiteboards in university though (1999-2003). So it seems the inflection point was probably right around 2000 give or take a few years depending on how much money your school district had!

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jbenze@reddit

We had blackboards and maybe overheads in college 97-99 so 2000 sounds right on the money.

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toasterb@reddit

I do remember it being a mix too. I remember math profs still used chalk, a psychology prof used overheads, and when I started TAing computer science sections in 2000 I had whiteboards. That was also when I discovered what happens when someone leaves the wrong type of markers on the whiteboard tray. It was very disconcerting to try and erase something with the side of my hand only to have it smear all over the board.

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jbenze@reddit

I worked at a company with a whiteboard in 1999; we had a big picture window in the data center. Our boss was right outside so to piss him off we would write backwards on the glass in erasable marker until he stormed in. One weekend someone borrowed our markers and it took us most of the day to remove some really awful insults written in permanent marker right on the glass.

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farrieremily@reddit

Mine was chalkboards until after I graduated. But we were K-12 on one big patched together building. Not a big district.

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Gonna_do_this_again@reddit

We used to steal blank overhead projector pages and draw dicks or whatever dumb stuff and hide them back in slide stack

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royv98@reddit

Had to draw them in permanent marker. Lmao

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DisplacedEastCoaster@reddit

I remember giving a presentation in grade 7 or 8 using the overhead projector. It confused my brain quite a bit trying to get the transparencies to move the right way. Up is down, left is right

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back_off_im_new@reddit

This may be a small town thing, but in elementary the teacher would let the good kids take a bucket with the erasers for the chalk board and bang them against a telephone pole out side to knock out all the chalk dust. You’d get to escape the classroom for 15-20 minutes and they’d get clean erasers. Of course, that meant I also breathed in what is undoubtedly an unhealthy amount of chalk dust.

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r2k398@reddit

We still had chalkboards at my university.

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Doun2Others10@reddit

The younger generations will never understand the privilege of being by trusted to go to the special closet of stuff and clean the erasers. I have no idea if it was a janitorial closet of some sort or a supply closet. The only thing that mattered was the eraser cleaner machine.

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testmonkeyalpha@reddit

Young generations in RICH neighborhoods switched to whiteboards.

As of the mid to late '00s all of schools I volunteered at still used chalkboards.

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matchalover@reddit

I grew up in a pretty poor neighborhood, in high school, the portables had white boards but the normal classrooms had chalk boards. My elementary and middle school were all chalkboards though.

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tarmgabbymommy79@reddit

Now they have three smart boards and five white boards. Not judging it though, my daughter's school experience is great

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KattanaKitten@reddit

I was born in 1990, I think that puts me just out of Xennial range? We still had chalkboards at my school up until I got to high school, then we had a mix of both. I'm also from a small, poor town so we were usually behind on getting new stuff like that.

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Flashy-Share8186@reddit

definitely chalkboards, mostly whiteboards in college, except some building had the green chalkboards with multiples so the prof could fill up the whole board and then slide it up to expose another board behind it. Also my art history lecture had two slide carousels and a projector, and grad students sitting in the back to change the left or right slide.

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ezmoney98@reddit

I remember my teacher in elementary writing the word Consequences in cursive and underlining it on the chalk board . Everyone got quiet as she slowly underlined it and made a scraping sound.

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chicacherrie82@reddit

I only knew chalkboards K through 12.

Or overhead projectors, but they projected those on the pull-down canvas screen thing that rolled up like the map mounted right above it. (Side note, though I graduated in 2002, our pull-down maps still had the USSR. Schools can be slow to update to the new thing, lol.)

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Mike__O@reddit

I never saw a whiteboard in a classroom setting until I went to college, and even then they were limited. Most of the classrooms I had classes in still had chalkboards

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abirdreads@reddit

Even through grad school, it was only chalkboards for me.

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rialucia@reddit

Same here.

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AnthropologicalSage@reddit

I loved washing the blackboards at the end of the day and even better when I got to go outside and clean the erasers with that’s weird vacuum thing

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KittyCubed@reddit

I didn’t see whiteboards until I went to college in 2001, and I was fascinated by them. We only had chalkboards while I was in school. By the time I began teaching in the district I graduated from, they’d switched to whiteboards.

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JimmyJooish@reddit

Chalkboards always looked dusty and it bothered me. Like even when the teacher cleaned them they looked dusty.

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Fickle_Wrangler_7439@reddit

Whiteboards get like that too eventually.

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canisdirusarctos@reddit

Shitty whiteboards, which is most of them. Real glass ones are expensive, but they’re safe to leave stuff on and infinitely cleanable.

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west-egg@reddit

Some teachers had that big eraser that took away the residual dust, somehow.

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canisdirusarctos@reddit

Chalk boards were pure torture for me. Every stroke was like shoving a hot railroad spike through my brain.

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ViceroyFizzlebottom@reddit

My elementary school had old black slate chalkboards. It was built in the 1910s. My high school had a mix of black slate and the more modern green boards. No white boards or dry erase markers to be found until college.

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Living-Video-3670@reddit

We had black(green)boards up until high school. We moved to the new high school half way through my freshman year and then it was all whiteboards.

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SmartyChance@reddit

Our school had an eraser vacuum. It was in the hallway, mounted to the wall. Silver chrome, skinny slot on top. As soon as you set the eraser on top, it turns on. You'd slide the eraser over the opening until the chalk was sucked out.

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Klutzy-Delivery-5792@reddit

I taught high school for much of the 2010s and had both types in my classrooms over the years. I'm at a pretty big university now and there's a mix of both.

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badpeoria@reddit

The joys of being the person to clap the chaulkboard erasers outside. 😄

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cjwi@reddit

I am 1986 so kind of over the line into true millennials but I'm the youngest sibling so I identify more as xennial based on culture etc... but in schools I never had whiteboards. Like maybe 1-2 teachers had one at some point? But they were a novelty. Even through HS it was all blackboards. And I attended school in 3 states from k-12 so it's not like I just had a one off.

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psykomatt@reddit

We only had whiteboards in our computer labs. Now my kids only have digital whiteboards.

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MaracujaBarracuda@reddit

My friend painted her wall in a special black paint which turned your wall into a chalk board and we had so much fun drawing on it

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jbenze@reddit

We still had blackboards until like 1987 when we had the great asbestos purge where we still went to school while they tore it out. The we had greenboards until high school and it was back to blackboards. I’ve never seen a whiteboard that n a classroom until my wife started teaching; we were lucky we had transparencies in college. We actually bought an overhead projector that n EBay for my wife to use her first 3 or 4 years of teaching.

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481126@reddit

I didn't see a whiteboard in a classroom until college.

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RockShowSparky@reddit

I’m nostalgic about a lot of things but good riddance to those.

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Slippery-Pete76@reddit

When I was a teaching assistant in grad school around 2006 I definitely still used blackboards (and overhead projectors) so younger millennials are definitely familiar with them.

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The_Max-Power_Way@reddit

I feel like I had blackboards the whole time (class of 2000) but university was when whiteboards started. Then I moved to Vietnam to teach English and had to learn to use a chalkboard again.

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Supersuperbad@reddit

My school still has chalkboards in some math rooms.

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Quirky_Dog5869@reddit

I remember being forced to hand write papers at the start of high-school. Printed stuff was way far fetched and inconceivable. At the end of high school it was just as inconceivable that your assignments were handwritten and not printed. If anything this underlines Xennial to me. It's almost impossible to explain this to my children.

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royv98@reddit

We were allowed to use typewriters instead of handwritten. And we had a nice old style typewriter. So I used that instead. Went through many gallons of white out correcting typos.

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jahmill@reddit

In high school, I remember most of my assignments were handwritten unless it was a paper or essay and I was in a magnet school program that gave us all MacBook Pros with the rest of our text books. (It was the mid 90's, so the MacBooks were not the sleek, cool designer things we have today. They were bulky, heavy and only had dozens of shades of Grey and the screen was similar to a calculator screen)

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morrisboris@reddit

Yes we had chalk boards and I couldn’t stand the sound or feel of the chalk, it was torture.

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cupcakebean@reddit

I hated when you got called to write on the chalkboard and your hand slipped. Knuckles and nails scraping the chalkboard is the WORST feeling.

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2d6DoomedWizards@reddit

whiteboards and internet were high school inventions for me

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jokerfest@reddit

Never got a whiteboard until college

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cupcakebean@reddit

I remember there was a machine in elementary school to clean the chalkboard erasers. It was like a shop vac with a metal thing that you would run the erasers over to suck out the chalk dust. It was always an exciting classroom job to be the eraser cleaner.

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PuppyJakeKhakiCollar@reddit

Don't forget how special you felt when you were picked to clean the erasers.

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_R_A_@reddit

We never had whiteboards in (high) school. Hell, some of the college classrooms were only half and half back then in the older buildings.

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gbroon@reddit

Mostly at my school it wasn't even boards it was a roller sort of thing that could be pulled up/down.

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mosesoperandi@reddit

This is gonna be one of those ones that's very geographically determined.

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MissMushroomBerry@reddit

I distinctly remember my 3rd grade teacher throwing an old school blackboard eraser at a classmate who was talking at the back of the class. I don’t remember if she hit her target or not because I was stunned by what she had done 😳

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Inner-Salt-2688@reddit

1984 here, I distinctly remember chalkboards through at least 7th or 8th grade. We also used an overhead projector in middle school alot. I "think" I remember white boards with dry erase markers 1999- 2000

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UnderH20giraffe@reddit

I had 0 whiteboards until college. Still think they’re weird.

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Zoso03@reddit

Didn't see whiteboards until I was in college in 2003.

They make way more sense, it didn't take long for teachers to ditch the overheads and just project their computer on the whiteboard and draw on that so they were still in the front of the room

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OPmeansopeningposter@reddit

Old school dark mode

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Hynch@reddit

I went to an old primary school (K-2) that had chalk boards. My elementary school was new, as in I went there the year it opened and it had white boards. Then my middle school had chalk boards again because it was so old. My high school had a mix of both. They replaced most of the chalk boards with white boards except in the really old wing since it was the least used area. My civics class and all my vocational classes has chalk boards but everything else was on whiteboard.

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Ingonyama70@reddit

I didn't see any teacher use a whiteboard until high school, then it was a mix between the two. When I finally went to college in 2013 (I graduated high school in 2000), it was almost exclusively whiteboards or online presentations.

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Inevitable_Tone3021@reddit

How 'bout when you could run your fingers along the grooves in the tray along the bottom off the chalkboard and make a little chalk dust pile at the end.

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ThermostatMcGee@reddit

Tactile memory unlocked

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davwad2@reddit

Blackboards, all the way, through high school. There were some whiteboards in college, but mostly blackboards.

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sundayfunday78@reddit

Chalkboards, blackboards, whiteboards…they allsuck when you’re a lefty 🫤

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ChickenArise@reddit

Going outside to clap the erasers was the a reward for being good. I still remember the smell

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afleetingmoment@reddit

I still remember my Calc II course freshman year of college where the prof would start a problem on one blackboard, then move it up to the top and continue on the second one behind it. The classroom has three tiers of three blackboards each, and this man would be non-stop powering thru problem sets and explaining everything out loud the whole time.

Now that I’m almost 40, I need whatever uppers he was on.

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Antique_Paramedic682@reddit

I think it depends on the school budget. I had chalkboards, my wife had dry erase. If you Google dry erase boards, they were popularized in 1975 when better markers became available.

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xRVAx@reddit

Yes exactly... chalkboards in elementary and middle school and then at some point in high school they installed whiteboards

Also. There's the pencil sharpener divide... I remember #2 pencils up to including high school. And then going to college and looking for a pencil sharpener and they laughed at me. I switched to mechanical pencils.

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grandma-activities@reddit

For me, it was chalkboards in elementary/middle school (it was all one school, and they were black) and high school (they were green), then whiteboards in college. But yeah, I think the boards are a dividing line.

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HicJacetMelilla@reddit

We had green and black chalkboards all through elementary and middle school. In high school we had the brown/tan (ugh) and black chalkboards in the old part of the school, and the new addition had white boards.

We also had overhead projectors and then my senior year the school got 1 or 2 of the video projectors. I honestly preferred the old ones with the transparent sheets.

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bluemitersaw@reddit

Agree. Literally the same as you. Elementary and middle school was blackboards and highschool was whiteboards.

Heh. Right after whiteboards were introduced one of the girls (Jen) in class bought her own markers of various colors. Kids were goofing around and some one drew a penis on the board with the stock market. Jen then traced it with her red marker. The teacher comes in and everyone quickly erased the board, except oops! Jen didn't know the markers are different and used permanent markers vs dry erase.

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Allureme@reddit

I hate chalk. Wish we had whiteboards

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CloseButNoChicory@reddit

Oh, I hate chalk dust! Whiteboards are uglier but at least the few classrooms in my school that featured them weren't going to have the dry, dry nastiness in the air.

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LovelyHead82@reddit

Had green chalkboards in elementary, middle and high school

Whiteboards in college

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Rare_Background8891@reddit

My third grade teacher would throw chalk at me because I never shut up. Definite had chalk boards.

My fourth/fifth grade class was in a portable and it had a white board. Only one in the school.

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yuccu@reddit

Green in grade school, then black in highschool. The science teachers and the two lawyers who taught English and History had white boards in highschool. Pretty sure they purchased and installed the boards themselves, since they hung from the top of the chalk board.

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natertheman1980@reddit

I had chalkboard all through school. Did not see massive use of white boards until 1999 at NAS Pensacola for basic electronics school. Now with 5 kids, nothing but white boards in their schools. Which same school district I went. Wow how times change.

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Ambitious_Toe_4357@reddit

What about eraser duty?

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jessek@reddit

They built a new elementary school when I was a kid in the 80s and it had whiteboards. Same thing happened with the new high school I went to in the 90s.

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pantheroux@reddit

My school had an old wing and a new wing. The new wing had whiteboards and this is where the math and science classes were so I had whiteboards for that.

We also had overhead projectors. I had a social studies teacher who would get on tangents talking about his childhood in WW2 Britain. One day, he was resting his arm on the overhead projector and smoke started rising. People tried to tell him, but he kept going on about getting milk in little bottles. The smoke got more intense and a girl finally screamed “Mr B, you are on fire!”

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NotMe739@reddit

My senior year of high school we got these fancy boards that were a dark teal color. You could use both chalk and dry erase markers on them. One teacher insisted on only using dry erase markers because "if the school is going to spend all this money on fancy boards I am going to use them, plus I don't like chalk dust" but he would only use blue or green markers that were difficult to see starting halfway back in the classroom. Black markers were apparently too difficult to wipe off the board cleanly. You know what did wipe off the board cleanly that almost every other teacher used . . . . Chalk!

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YourOwnPunkyBrewster@reddit

I would also ad that we were shown educational films on reel to reel projectors up until (at least in my school) about Jr high/Highschool, then it switched to a Big TV cart with VHS. So maybe the last gen to experience projectors?

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LineImpossible3958@reddit

All I knew was chalkboards or dry erase. In grade school I remember taking the erasers to get cleaned on this little machine down the hall. An 8th grader usually ran the cleaner. I had a teacher in high school, Mr. Ryan, he routinely wore the classic short sleeve shirt with a clip on tie, always disheveled, sort of looks like actor David Marciano(Billings on the Shield) giant and sparse combover that was always protesting its placement, but what I remember most was how chalky his hands would get. Like a chalk magnet. He would scribble his math on the board and by the end of class filthy hands.

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Anieya@reddit

Hell, I had quite a few blackboards in college. Those century(-ies) old buildings are difficult to modernize lol

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jimicus@reddit

And there was always at least one teacher who was emotionally attached to his blackboard and resisted the school's attempts to replace it with a whiteboard.

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AndrewInMN@reddit

I grew up in a small, rural school district. Blackboards all the way through. And now I’m having flashbacks of being called up to finish a math problem on the board when I had zero idea how to even do it. Man I hated that teacher.

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FionaGoodeEnough@reddit

We had blackboards all the away through, except in one high tech classroom.

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HuckleberryLogical63@reddit

yep, chalkboards in elementary/middle (though they were green not black), whiteboards in high school.

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furtyfive@reddit

We had no whiteboards. Chalkboards only. ‘79.

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blacktrufflesheep@reddit

Did anyone ever do that prank where you stick a bit of chalk in the grooves of the eraser, causing the next person to dirty the board even more when they go to erase it?

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saison257@reddit

100%

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Obi_Wan_Benobi@reddit

Absolutely.

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GoodStuffOnly62@reddit

Born in ‘82. I had chalkboards throughout k-12 school and college, with white boards being introduced in high school, but they never fully replaced chalkboards in my time.

My only experience with smartboards is as an adult using spaces where they are installed. Always broken or just too complicated to use as more than a whiteboard.

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cosp85classic@reddit

Had chalkboards/blackboards halfway through elementary school. I think it switched when the new brick and mortar school building opened up and we moved out of the portables. All whiteboards after that though.

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tasukiko@reddit

Chalkboards in elementary, whiteboards in middlschool and beyond.

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ahawk99@reddit

gif

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Kiethblacklion@reddit

I currently work at a college and I would like to point at that some of the classrooms still contain chalk boards. They are mostly in the music hall, as those green chalk boards have stripes to mark the bars for drawing music notes.

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Then_Increase7445@reddit

We got whiteboards in 4th grade I believe, 1994. On the other hand, I teach at a university in Germany now where they use almost exclusively chalkboards. There is also an overhead projector in one of the classrooms.

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CheesyRomantic@reddit

Green chalkboard girlie here. We may have had blackboards too... but I remember the green ones.

We called them chalkboards.

I never had a whiteboard while I was in school.

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Disastrous_Bother173@reddit

We had both all the way through, plus projectors in a bunch of classrooms.

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viridiansoul@reddit

We definitely had chalkboards in elementary school and through middle school. Especially in elementary school, it was a fight every day over who got to go outside and beat the erasers.

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allforfunnplay27@reddit

Chalkboard in school in the 80s. Chalkboard in college in the 90s. Whiteboards when I taught at a private technical school in the late 90s and early 00s.

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ExpressReveal2480@reddit

Born in 1977, I don't really even remember any whiteboards in college. College was a mix of blackboards and overhead projectors that got written on with markers and then had a reel to move forward for the next sheet.

I graduated from college in 1999, by the time I finished there were a few high tech classrooms on campus with fancy digital projectors but a lot of professors would still stick to the overhead projector.

I think the bigger one that is interesting is in the corporate workforce since the mid 1990s it's been all whiteboards, but my kid (born in 2012) has always had "smart boards" in the classroom. It's fascinating that every classroom in the public school gets those but not one of the multi billion dollar companies I've worked for in my career has ever thought it made sense to buy any.

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dkonigs@reddit

I remember working in an office around the mid 2000's which was full of "smart boards" that were never connected or somehow didn't work right. So basically there would be conference rooms filled with what looked like whiteboards, with notes to not use dry erase markers on them because they were smart boards. So totally useless.

Later on, it was more common to just have normal whiteboards and then a projector.

These days, somehow, a lot of this has been replaced with gigantic TVs instead, which feels more expensive but maybe it isn't so bad anymore.

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melissastandard@reddit

What about banging out the erasers out the window????

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Tigerzombie@reddit

It was chalk boards everywhere except for the newly built science wing. They had whiteboards. College was 2 rows of chalkboards that you would slide up and down. My kids’ classes all have smart boards and whiteboards.

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Moxie_Stardust@reddit

Based on the comments looks like there's a lot of variance. I was born in 77, and yeah, it was chalkboards all through junior high, then whiteboards in high school. But we were also one of the first ones to attend high school at that location, it had previously only been a K-8, but due to another military base closing they added 9-12 on the upper floor, so that's probably why it had whiteboards (lower grades still had their old blackboards).

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pismobeachdisaster@reddit

My classroom had a chalkboard until 2015, but that’s because I was in a portable trailer. I’ve been inside of the building since then and have white boards and a Smart Board.

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SevereDeparture739@reddit

I think you're probably right. We still had chalkboards throughout my schooling but they were all old buildings.

The elementary bathroom still had the trough sink with foot pedal, powdered soap, and the fabric towel on the roll that was always sopping wet. It was dark and creepy in there, so perfect for playing Bloody Mary.

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drainbamage1011@reddit

We only had whiteboards in the computer labs up until I got to college. Everything else was chalkboards.

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TrixieBastard@reddit

I had whiteboards in high school, but to be fair, I was part of the first graduating class that attended that building for all three years of high school. It was brand brand new

Weird to think that there's been at least one remodel since I graduated, because surely the place isn't old enough to have needed one, dammit!

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Witty-Management6094@reddit

I can feel the chalk dust in my lungs 😅😩😩😩

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alvinofdiaspar@reddit

Had them all though high school and even university, so I can’t imagine early Millennials didn’t get to experience them.

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Beneficial-Finger353@reddit

My teachers used projectors before getting whiteboards.

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beeurd@reddit

I only had blackboards at my primary school, and my high school had a mix but mostly whiteboards.

I asked my husband (several years younger than me) what he had at his schools and he said it was all whiteboards... and smartboards 💀

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Electronic-Spinach43@reddit

One or two classes in high school had the new whiteboards and markers.

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MsBlondeViking@reddit

Elementary school I went to the longest had green chalk boards, and they had white boards. The elementary school all four of my kids have attended, has smart boards and the OG blackboards.

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not-hardly@reddit

Chalmkbord.

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UnicornScientist803@reddit

In my elementary school we would sometimes have class jobs and washing the chalkboard at the end of the day was one of my favorites!

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Formal-Telephone5146@reddit

We never had whiteboard

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DrMcJedi@reddit

gif

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an_harmonica@reddit

Ms. Lippy clearly was insane.

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Day2205@reddit

and us lefties still struggled with both ☹️

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MisRandomness@reddit

Ours were green and everyone wanted to be the kid that gets to wash them, and draw the lines with the thingamajig

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AetheriaInBeing@reddit

I had chalk boards through middle school. Except the computer lab specifically had a white board. I think the library did too because he rolled it around for the library "class" in there.

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Bulky_Pop_8104@reddit

The blackboards were there, but it was almost exclusively projectors with a marker

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zsrh@reddit

In my experience chalkboards were in use until I was in Grade 10 after that it was all whiteboards.

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Legitimate-Head-8862@reddit

I think you just went to a fancy school district

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Treadingresin@reddit

I think we had chalkboards all the way through. I vaguely remember the white board starting to become a thing that sometimes rolled its way into a classroom.

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ChiMara777@reddit

We had chalkboards. Our school had to build an annex to accommodate the growing enrollment, so in 1996 (6th grade) the upper grades moved into the annex and that’s when I first had white boards.

I can’t remember whether my high school had blackboards or white boards. Can’t remember college either. But I wouldn’t be surprised if both still had blackboards or possibly a mix of both blackboards and whiteboards

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Logical-Cherry9395@reddit

IDK. I'm '77 and we had blackboards in elementary, greenboards in middle and high school, and when I got to college in 2005, it was green boards there, as well. I think it's just the age of your school.

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Wolfpack87@reddit

Blackboards k-college. Some (like maybe 10%) of the "newer" college classes had whiteboard, but mostly not.

Students hated the chalk tho. We use to use markers on windows/glass instead.

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esocharis@reddit

I never had a whiteboard in class until late college, not counting small personal ones that teachers brought in themselves. Even then it was only in the newest building lol

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bcentsale@reddit

Same. Most of the classrooms in college except for a handful in one building were chalk. Now everything is digital.

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Diligent-Resist8271@reddit

Graduated '98. Blackboards/chalkboards up until high school. But we had a computer lab in middle school school (not just a computer on a rolling cart, a classroom filled with computers), and when I was leaving middle school the elementary school got a computer lab and a rolling cart for video shooting and editing. My high school had a couple of computer labs, classes for those labs, and then my senior year they got a STEM lab which they taught CAD. But still blackboards/chalkboards.

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Frosty_Cloud_2888@reddit

Black boards all the way the in college it was mix of black board and white boards

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cybah@reddit

Agree. We were part of the transition from blackboards to white boards. Had blackboards in elementary and junior high, but the high school was renovated at the end of my sophomore year (1993) and they were replaced with whiteboards over the summer.

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ancilla1998@reddit

Chalkboards only in K-9, whiteboards in some of the newer classrooms in high school, and overhead projectors in others.

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someguyfromsk@reddit

The original part of my school had black chalkboards, the newer additions had green boards.

The school was renovated in grades 7-8, and all the boards were replaced with whiteboards.

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tpero@reddit

I definitely had to clap erasers and wash the blackboard in grade school. Jr high it was all white boards.

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Far-Bumblebee-7216@reddit

The 2 foot long eraser being hurled across the room at a student by a teacher several years past retiring…

Wait…was that just my 5th grade experience? (twasn’t me…but said teacher also chucked a steel trash can at same kid).

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Kelvin_Inman@reddit

Or….blackboards versus Blackboard.

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GnomesStoleMyMeds@reddit

I didn’t even have white boards in high school! The school started installing them when I was in grade 11 but it was all in classrooms used in niner and grad 10 classes. And half my lecture halls in university still had blackboards.

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Ok-Concert-6475@reddit

Elementary thru high school was all chalkboard. College was overhead projectors.

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fromthedarqwaves@reddit

My schools were all old. My 4th grade math teacher mentioned that her chalkboards were real slate which meant nothing to 10 year old me. Middle school everyone had green chalkboards and in highschool some rooms had white boards but not many. The teachers had to buy their own markers so they were never lying around for people to use.

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