How To: Chalkboards

You would think, this being the age of technology and computers and basically mind reading, that a college that charges upward of $45,000 a year to attend and use its facilities could find the place in its budget for upgrading from the typical, probably antique chalkboard to a more user friendly, technologically advanced whiteboard. But no. That would just be too practical.

And you don't learn practicality at college.

You learn other life skills, like the sound [f] is a voiceless labiodental fricative.

Or that sometimes the adjectives go in front of the noun in Spanish, but only if the adjective is not comparative, or if it is subjective to the person describing said noun.

Or that in some Hindu philosophy, everything is the same thing, and everything is different things, all at the same time.

But practicality? Nope. Never. Who would ever need to learn things like self-discipline or efficiency or time management or how to cook something besides eggs, all things that come with learning practicality?

It wouldn't be that hard, college! To teach us how to be practical. All it would take on your part is showing that chalkboards are a thing of the past, and that you understand that having a more efficient writing surface in your classrooms is the PRACTICAL thing to do.

Now, to be fair, I'm not sure if buildings like, say, the science and math buildings, have whiteboards. I don't really have classes in there. But if they do, then I refuse to be fair anymore, because this is going to turn into a rant about why society places higher value on math and science and engineering and "things that take real brain power" than English and history and languages and humanities, even though you better know how to read and write and talk before you know how to do high level calculus if you want to get along in society, but that's besides the point. And maybe freaking out about math getting whiteboards long before the languages even get to know what a whiteboard is is not the best way to draw attention to this strangely inequitable divide that has haunted me through most of my high school career and all of my college career, but you have to start somewhere. But anyway. I was talking about chalkboards.

So, the classrooms I frequent are generally not equipped with such grand technology. I don't know if you remember this (because you'd probably have to be alive during the Middle Ages), but chalk is not the most pleasant of substances. It's all dusty, and if you do it wrong, it makes hideous, eardrum shattering noises. And, did I mention that it's dusty? There's no good way to get it off of your person. Either you leave it on your hands and suffer through having scary, probably flammable chalk dust all over your important appendages, or you wipe it off on your clothes, and then people laugh at you all day because you have white splotches all over your otherwise excellent appearance.

Or, of course, you could just leave the room to go wash your hands, but the bathroom is probably six floors away, because whoever designed the building decided that it was only necessary to have one bathroom in the entire place. (Did I mention that this building was the languages building, not the math one, which happens to have bathrooms galore? Oh, sorry. Off topic again.) But then you waste precious class time. And you're basically paying for all that class time, class time that you had to spend in a bathroom, washing terrifying chalk dust off your hands because your in danger of being too expensive college REFUSES TO BUY WHITEBOARDS FOR YOU.

Is this a sign that I care too much about little things? I don't know. Maybe. But maybe the little things make all the difference.

Here. Advice to the children who are choosing a college right now: Disregard everything else about the college of your choice, and go make sure it has whiteboards in every single classroom. Do it. Do it now. Drive to your college and break into the buildings and check out the whiteboard situation. Once you've done that, then go back to all your other requirements. Trust me, though. Whiteboards can make or break your day.

Just make sure you break them before they break you.