The Black Board
When I was at University I had nearly all my lectures presented on a black board. This may have been as high as 90%, although some of the lectures were presented using projection screens. The black boards were necessary since they allowed the lecturer to take the student through the process of a mathematical derivation so they could follow the reasoning and the foundational principles being taught.
They were also very useful since it allowed for the free flow of discussion. A student could ask a question, and after some back and forth new equations or graphs would appear on the black board which helped to elucidate the ideas. This aided the student in their understanding of the concepts but also helped to reinforce the lecturers own understanding.
I loved the black boards so much that I would even use them for self-study. During the lunch breaks I would go into a lecture room and have it all to myself and work through some physics or engineering problems I had not fully understood. My favourite was during half-terms where I could get a lecture room all to myself. I would take lunch in there with me, kick off my shoes and just be alone in my own thoughts in total solitude, explaining the concepts to myself, as though I was teaching them to others. This helped me enormously and also filled me with a personal joy and love for the institution that is a university.
The image below shows one of my last sessions where I had a lecture room all to myself and worked through some derivations on a black board. It was for a plasma physics problem and how to numerically model it using a Vlasov-solver code, that solves the collisionless Boltzmann equation, also known as the Vlasov equation.
I personally find black boards so helpful, and I even have two at home today that I use, although they are not as large. I also have a white board which I occasionally use but its not quite the same for me. I’m very old school, and like to work problems out with a chalk on board. For most of the problems I work on however, I’m sitting at a desk with a pen and paper working through a derivation. But I also find this limiting, and it feels very constraining for me. I’m a big picture thinker and I like to step back and to visualise the problem I am working on and pause for contemplation and review.
I am not alone in my love for the black board. The image below is the last black board of the physicist Richard Feynmann which contains a mix of problems on it, some of which appears to be metrics and relating to the action principle. It also contains some quotes on the board “what I cannot create I do not understand” and “know how to solve every problem that has been solved”. Feynmann believed in a foundational understanding from first principles, rather than the simple memorisation of facts. I read many of his books when I was studying my post-graduate Master’s degree and they helped me a lot.
The image below shows the office of Albert Einstein when he died. In addition to his messy desk, we see a black board of problems behind filled with mathematical equations. Again, they are problems associated with metrics and probably quantum field theory, a subject he was working on towards the end of his life in his search for a unified field theory.
In the image below we see the physicist Freeman Dyson, in his 90s, sitting in front of a black board of problems. I was fortunate to have corresponded with Dyson for a decade or so before he passed. A brilliant man and one of absolute humility. The problems appear to be related to cosmology. He was one of the clearest minds I had ever encountered. At the time I was the Chief Editor of a technical academic astronautical journal, and he would occasionally review papers for me. Watching his mind work was like seeing a knife cut through butter. There was no noise and a level of clarity rarely experienced.
Finally, as another example, we see below the physicist John Wheeler also using a black board to explain his ideas to students and faculty. Again, I was fortunate to have corresponded with Wheeler before he passed via his colleague Kenneth Ford. Wheeler was a remarkable man who also acted as the supervisor for Feynmann during his graduate studies.
Today, one of my concerns about education is that students are simply taught to memorise facts and methods to solving problems. For example, students are given previous exam papers and asked to work through them, in the hope that a future exam will simply be a perturbation of that question. Fair enough, this is a valid method, and I have used it myself. But I am very concerned that we are not teaching understanding, but memorisation and they are absolutely not the same thing. For example, we might as a society celebrate someone that wins lots of quiz shows because they can answer a lot of general knowledge questions, but that is not the same as understanding and neither does it equate to wisdom.
In my experience, the best knowledge is that which is hard earned through a rigorous process of learning. With my own children, when they come home from School with maths or science problems, I can see how formalised the methodology is and it concerns me a great deal. So when I can, I do try to get them in front of either my black board or my white board, and try to teach them to understand the concepts they are learning, from a big picture perspective. When I ask them to solve a problem I can also see very clearly whether they have understood it or not and there is no hiding from the shiny big board.
Sitting at a desk solving problems has its place, but it’s also quite hard work and can even be tortuous for students. Instead, I would advocate for an education system that went back to basics and got students in front of a black board where they could themselves attempt to understand and solve problems. Also, if they did this sometimes in groups, it could be a lot of fun as they jointly share the journey to getting to a solution, and through that process also learn about team work.
Nobody knows what the future will be like, and the one thing we can say about it is that it will be filled with uncertainty. The best we can do for the next generation is to give them the problem-solving capacity to address the sorts of challenges they may face. Analytical thinking must be a part of this method. In my humble opinion, the black board and chalk has a big role to play in facilitating that approach. There is a board and a chalk, and only your mind in between. Either you know the answer, or you don’t, but you can at least have fun in the attempt at trying to figure it out, and if the answer is wrong, simply scribble it out and try again to see where you faltered in the attempt.
The doing away of the black board in school education systems has been an awful setback in my opinion and one that should have been resisted by teachers who value a free-thinking student population that grow up with an imagination and an ability to think for themselves. It is just one of the many elements that has led to the decline of the western education system. I would also urge all households to get one and for families to spend time with their kids in front of a black board as a great teaching aid, but also a place where the children can grow in confidence as they realise a solution appears before their eyes. As we embrace new technological tools for learning, we should not neglect the important role played in some of the old school methods and a happy medium should be found in learning about the world.
