The Blackboard
The Twentieth Century having not two years left to run, and all of us having spent some portion of that century in one school or another, it is right that we should consider the classroom of the Third Millennium. What, we ask, will attending classes be like
JANE LIPSON
Chemistry 66: Classical Physical Chemistry
when the Fourth Millennium impends?
In our time, of course, the classroom has come a long way from its antique condition, essentially that of a small meetinghouse. Now we have classrooms without walls, without desks, without books. Classrooms without teachers come naturally to an age of telecom-
DONALD SHEEHAN
English 2: Reading and Writing in the Arts and Sciences
munications; so, no doubt, someday soon will classrooms without students, the Virtual Classroom a strange land.
Nevertheless, however far the classroom should evolve, it will remain unchanged in one particular: there will be a blackboard on the wall. That is, there will be a large surface whereon an adult who knows something
IOANA CHITORAN
Linguistics 22: Syntax
can scrawl away with more or less aplomb while the young who wish to learn copy those same scrawls assiduously down in their notebooks or they sleep, or they look out the window. As can be seen in these pages, Dartmouth teachers, working in one of the best-equipped colleges in the land, continue to cover acres of blackboard with the
THOMAS SPENCER
Chemistry 152: Advanced Organic Synthesis and Mechanisms
lingo of their disciplines, with results variously cryptic, intimidating, and beautiful. In the classroom of the future, their successors will do the same.
Our Fearless Very Long-Range Prediction, then: no classroom without a blackboard, notin 1998,notin 2998.
Why? Because the blackboard is more than a tool. It is
DELO MOOK
Science 13: Introductory Physical Science
learning's timeless and indispensable metaphor. For what happens to a blackboard and its confident, esoteric inscriptions is what happens in the end to everything we have learned, and indeed to ourselves: at night comes the guy with the sponge, and the following day the board is blank and clean and ready for the next class.
