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Willys Peck

Blackboards provide backdrop for memories

Maybe I was overlooking something on that visit to the old haunts, but I don't think so.

It was the annual Saratoga Grammar School reunion, and my wife, Betty, and I were at the Oak Street campus to greet alumni before the picnic at Wildwood Park. The surroundings were familiar, all right, but in visiting my first- through fifth-grade classrooms, something definitely seemed missing: the blackboards.

There was plenty of space for tacking things up, and there were white panels which, I am told, serve as blackboards did, but without the chalk dust. They use marking pens, or some such, which are tidier, but the writing surface itself occupies much less space.

It's just not like having blackboards.

My idea of a classroom is windows along all of one wall and blackboards along most of the other three. That way you can get the whole class up there for written exercises. Which brings up this rather touchy matter of high-tech.

Frankly, as one who is being dragged kicking and screaming into the Information Age, I'm suspicious of all these computer terminals I see around. What, I ask, can a kid learn on-line that he or she can't learn off-blackboard? And more more cheaply, I might add.

(OK, OK, so I'm composing this on a word processor, and I'll be taking it down to the Saratoga News office on a floppy disk. So sue me.)

Some of my indelible grammar school memories involve blackboards, beginning with first grade.

Incidentally, I get a certain satisfaction from the dynastic implications of having gone to first grade in the same classroom where, half a century later, my wife taught kindergarten for many years.

We didn't have kindergarten in my time, though. Back in 1929, one wall of the classroom consisted of a species of accordion doors which could open into the auditorium, now the media center.

On the classroom side, each door section had a blackboard instead of a wood panel, and each pupil was assigned a door section. At the top, teacher Pearl Davis had written our names in script, which we painstakingly copied--on the blackboard. To this day, I still write upper-case W's and P's in the way I first saw them there.

It was while in either second or third grade that I remember Mrs. Grace Poole--she taught both classes in the same room--writing "tion" on the blackboard and asking the class how it was pronounced. I raised my hand. "Tie-un," I said, pleased that I could form the syllables as they appeared written.

That's when I learned about "shun," as in acSHUN, attenSHUN, menSHUN, and so forth. Spelling lessons like that tend to stay with one.

Next door, in fourth grade, teacher Meredith Rowell used the blackboard to good advantage in demystifying the math involved in long division, which needed all the demystifying it could get.

There's something about seeing the physical manipulation of figures--erasing and rewriting as necessary--that gets a point across.

In the fifth grade, our teacher, a Miss Black, each week would write a poem on the blackboard for us to memorize.

She also had a small upright piano in the room, and I can remember in particular learning the words to "Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms," and the music that went with it.

Another poem we were called on to learn was that old Edgar A. Guest chestnut that begins "Somebody said that it couldn't be done..." No music, though.

In the eighth grade, Mrs. Bertha R. Seely, teacher and principal, used to diagram sentences on the blackboard, explaining structure and parts of speech.

Somehow, I see a metaphysical link between the absence of blackboards and the fact that the institutions themselves are now known as elementary rather than grammar schools.

Finally, there is the disciplinary aspect of blackboards. Show me the computer that can engender the same feeling of remorse as that inspired by the writing of "I will not talk in class" 100 times as part of the temporary room decor.

Just color me mossback.

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