Though the termblackboardhas a colour right there in its name , most of them are n’t actually black . While we still use the term more or less interchangeably with chalkboard , blackboards be given to be dark-green . Why the dispute ? Why call a airfoil a blackboard if it ’s green ?
Because 200 years ago , blackboardswereblack . Accordingto generator Lewis Buzbee’sBlackboard : A Personal account of the Classroom , big boards of connected ticket that teacher could write on for the whole class to see did n’t come around until the early 1800s , and the name blackboard was n’t used until 1815 . They were made with slate , or in rural areas , they were often just wooden boards painted dark with egg albumen flux with the remains of charred potatoes . afterward , they were also made of wood darken with a commercially made porcelain - based ink . They were , reliable to their name , dim .
And the relatively affordable , omnipresent technologywas a huge success , changing education forever . By the mid-19th century , even the most rural schools had a blackboard .
In the 20th century , blackboards set about to seem a little dissimilar , though the melodic theme was the same . In the 1930s , manufacturers begin to make chalkboards using a green , porcelain enameled paint on a steel base of operations . By the1960s , the unripened chalkboard trend was infull swing . Teachers had discovered that a different colored blusher was a mountain more well-to-do to stare at all day , because green porcelain paint cut down on glare . By and large , many blackboards were easy replaced by their fleeceable Brother . ( ostensibly , greenboardswasn’t quite as catchy of a name , though , so the termblackboardstuck . )
But today , many shoal children might not be intimate with either blackboards or " greenboards . " In the1990s , school began converting their schoolroom to whiteboards , which produce less dust ( and eliminate that terrible screeching noise ) . According toThe Atlantic , at the spell of the millennium , whiteboards were outselling chalkboards by a 4 - to-1 ratio .
you’re able to still find the periodic chalkboard in a classroom , though — even if it ’s justdecorative . And some schools are rediscover blackboard , literally . In the summertime of 2015 , construction workers renovating an Oklahoma school day for sassy whiteboardsfoundtwo historic slate blackboards that still bore drawing from almost 100 twelvemonth ago .
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