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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

> Blackboard Technique

Use Whiteboard. Worst teaching experiences in my life have featured blackboards. Ooh that scree of the chalk and the eraser that does no such thing.

Mind you, I haVE bad experiences with whiteboards too, particulary when the previous user defaced the board with non-whiteboard markers

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Sounds like crummy chalk -- a good blackboard with some chalk is heaven for me. Whiteboards are so sterile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8

I will never miss whacking the erasers to remove the chalk dust in the morning as a child or the screech of chalk.

The “dust” from a whiteboard is worse, imo. And I used to like clapping the erasers!

A proper blackboard with proper chalk, such as Hagoromo chalk, is far superior to and cleaner than the best whiteboard.

In general, even non-Hagoromo chalk can be brushed or washed off, unlike dry erase marker dust that gets on everything and can stain. Also, I personally dislike the lack of friction when writing with dry erase markers.

My experience is that whiteboards are the worst, because checking that the markers work properly is almost never done before the course.

Also they tend to be much smaller for some reason.

I don’t know why but I find the chalk-on-a-blackboard in the MIT courseware lectures on algorithms so satisfying.

This is also my favorite one I’ve seen so far: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-006-introduction-to-algorithms...

Agreed, but we'd better zip up our flame proof suits before the chalk fans arrive. Look, I appreciate dark mode as much as the next guy and the chalk bouncing trick is super slick, but my god, the sound.

My primary school teachers liked to joke how they’d all die of bronchitis or tuberculosis from inhaling all that chalk dust over the years.

I remember my teachers, quite distinctly, saying the same. In fact I can still visualize the way they wrote on blackboard, opened the books and asked questions. Teachers were useful because they solved our questions when we couldn't find the answer.

I remember my skinny, somewhat pinched in-her-late 50’s calculus teacher drawing perfect huge circles on the blackboard in less than a second, using her double-jointed shoulder as the pivot. I had been warned about this by my buddy who hah had her for trig.

Maybe irreverent here but a permanent marker used on a whiteboard can be erased by a dry erase marker, it's basically magic

this was before whiteboards were commonplace i guess . whiteboards are better but i still see chalkboards in lectures today.

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