Graduate Student Reflection Series: Ode to Chalk

Nothing sounds more like a classroom to me than the rhythm of chalk on a chalkboard.

Really, I associate very few sounds with education at all. There’s the sound of the bell that marks the beginning and end of class, and there’s the graduation song “Pomp and Circumstance,” but these sounds tend to be associated more with the end of an educational experience—and the relief that comes from reaching it—rather than the experience itself.

The sound chalk makes on a board has a pattern to it. It’s got two distinct sound groups, like Morse code: the short tock-tock-taps and the long chhhssshhhs. It’s warm and rhythmic, with pauses and variation, not relentless and bright like the kssssckkk of static from a television. Static masks noise. The sound of chalk brings your attention in; its rhythm is hypnotizing… or at least it has that potential. It can focus the listener with its regularity and warmth; it can be used to emphasize points through cadences brought out by the variations in sounds. It’s percussive and instrumental.

I’ve had two professors with very striking boardwork. Tom Wieting’s was impeccable and elegant; Ralf Bader’s abstract and maniacally beautiful. Right there on the board, we could see a mapped-out representation of how their minds organized ideas—or at least it felt that way. Wieting would pick up the pieces gently and situate them, with astonishingly perfect freeform lines and curves. Bader would shove the pieces around, making little nests of symbols and diagrams.

It’s no surprise that a large part of one’s chalkboard style is bound up in how that person uses the chalk, but equally as important is how that person erases it. Wieting sectioned his board, and when a new idea needed to come in, he would calmly, slowly, and decidedly swipe across full sections in silence with the eraser. Bader would fill the entire board with etchings and erase in a circle in the middle with his hand, creating a halo of chalk around the idea he wanted to bring out in that moment. For Bader, no idea important enough to make it to the board was ever fully erased. It made up the background environment, that nest or halo for the new thought. Both styles were extremely effective, but in entirely opposite ways.

Each teaching medium emphasizes and suppresses different aspects of learning. PowerPoints emphasize visuals and animations, quick bullet-point information. When done well and in certain contexts, it efficiently and effectively communicates facts, facts students can often reference again later.

I’ve always felt at odds with the style of PowerPoint. It’s constraining and static to me; I end up focusing too much of my time on style and flash over the content and how to communicate it. And when I’m on the other end of a PowerPoint presentation, when I’m the one watching rather than giving the talk, I feel very visually disconnected from the speaker and her thinking process. It makes me wonder if PowerPoint just emphasizes something that the audience can find online, and in an often more accessible way. I’ve seen interesting PowerPoints—but not many—and no beautiful ones.

I assume that—in most disciplines—the hard part is learning the process, not the facts. It’s easier to know that a statement is true or that a theorem can be proven than it is to know why it’s true or how it can be proven. Proofs can feel alien and random. Chalk slows us down. Even if it takes longer to get to the punch, boardwork can help bring out the methods of the discipline. The teacher is situated to make mistakes, to troubleshoot, to think in real time, and the student watches that process unfold.

You can probably imagine already that Wieting’s boardwork was clean and steady, that it was somewhat jarring to see him make a mistake. His reactions to these moments were interesting, and funny. He didn’t just communicate where the mistake came from and how he would think through fixing it; he would genuinely have an intensely joyful reaction to it. He told us about this list he had on his fridge of interesting problems he hadn’t solved and ideas he didn’t understand; that every morning he would wake up, look at them, and feel inspired that there was still a lot left he could learn. He taught us to feel excited about what we didn’t know, not overwhelmed or intimidated. He taught us to take joy in our mistakes.

Chalk isn’t the only medium that emphasizes the process over the facts—live coding, animating, painting, or other tutorials do that too—nor is it the only medium that lays parts of the teacher’s mind bare to the class, there are always markers and whiteboards.

But chalk is more dramatic. It’s tactile and textural: sweeping curves and rigid lines that follow the grain of the board, flecks and puffs of dust, the smudging, the shading, the marks of ghostly residue on your clothes… the sound. You can strike your chalk straight into the board to draw attention to a point, or strike it at an angle, skipping and skidding to produce those dotted lines in the style of Walter Lewin. The very act of writing with chalk compels you to make a deliberate mark with force and conviction.

And to me, it’s nostalgic. My first experiences with chalk were as a child drawing on streets and sidewalks. It was creativity, it was summer, it was learning for that age.

Some of us lose something when we turn to whiteboards or slides: we lose the drama, the reliability, the sound, and the nostalgia. Maybe it’s just the aesthetic or the tradition that I like, but I’m fine with that. Chalk it up to preference.

Eliya Cohen

Eliya Cohen is a PhD candidate at Princeton University and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Entertainment Arts and Engineering Program at the University of Utah. Her research focuses primarily on philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of video games.