doodledee

The Strib recently ran a cover story about how some University of Minnesota classrooms have old-school chalkboards and how others have the new white boards. Plenty of people have already written in to bitch about how chalkboards shouldn't be front page news, but I say screw them because a) the news is boring and repetitive as of late - oh look! another car bomb in iraq! - b) nobody reads the 'paper' paper anymore anyway, so who cares if it was on the front page and c) white boards suck.

Don't believe me that whiteboards suck? Well head over to the disaster that is the CSci building at the U, with it's bajillion whiteboards and 8 working markers, and watch as your fresh-off-the-boat TA tries to teach an ENTIRE LECTURE of numerical analysis using a dry, crusty, maybe-I-can-scratch-the-equation-into-the-board marker. Or sit back and watch Actual Professors come to class EVERY DAY and hunt around for a working marker even though none of them have worked FOR THE LAST SIX MONTHS. Watch as students bring new markers to class, confident that their bozo profs won't have the smarts to remember to bring a fresh one. (Students buying supplies for teachers?! Take that, public school teachers!)

And what's more, blackboards are just plain old better.

Blackboards rule because they're traditional and they're stuffy and they're messy and they make you feel like you're in some sort of real institution of higher learning. When you take a physics class in one of those big old lecture halls at the U and the professor fills 6 boards with diagrams and formulas - including the 'upper' boards that he has to pull down and then push back up to the ceiling - that's when you feel like you're engaged in the class. The professor is passionate. His fingers are dusty, the sleeves on his corduroy blazer are dusty, and - oh yeah - YOU CAN READ THE BOARD because studies have shown that white on black shows-up better than pale yellow on white. GENIUS!

But don't get me wrong. Everyone's office at work has a whiteboard and - since we have tons of makers - we use them all the time. I even worked at a client where every wall in every room was solid whiteboard. They manage entire projects by writing notes on the walls in project-dedicated "war rooms". I'm not saying it worked, I'm just saying they did it. Wacko alert!

And as bad as whiteboards are, they're wiggi better than a stupes PowerPoint lecture. The worst! I seriously think that those lectures where some boring, disinterested professor reads slides off a screen while sitting on a stool should only cost half as much as a 'traditional' class. I used to get so worked up in one of my chemistry classes that it would take 2 hours of girl watching on the mall with friends just to calm down.

And wouldn't you know that the entire business world lives and dies by PowerPoint? Gah! Double Gah!

In summary: walk the walk, keep the chalk, tony hawk, powerpoint sucks.

Blackboard Blues [strib]
PowerPoint is Evil [wired]
PowerPoint Makes You Dumb [nyt]