This summer, my university took out the blackboard in the room where I teach, replacing it with a horrible whiteboard. Although only a few weeks old, it alread

This summer, my university took out the blackboard in the room where I teach, replacing it with a horrible whiteboard. Although only a few weeks old, it already cannot be erased properly, as far as I can tell. I have my own markers and eraser to avoid the "tragedy of the commons" with dried-out markers. I recommend this scheme to anybody, because it avoids the frustration of going through one pen after another, in search for one that writes without skipping. But, even with a good marker, I find it quite difficult to get a constant-thickness line, especially for quick markings on the board. So, almost everything I write gets erased at first, getting only a bit better as I reorient the pen. This is quite annoying for students. And I can barely write mathematical symbols with those damned markers. Also, the shiny whiteboard reflects the overhead lights, which means that it's hard for my students to see what I'm writing. On the educational front: nothing gained, quite a bit lost. On the cost front: pens burn up money faster than chalk, and whiteboards need to be replaced every few years, because something happens to make them difficult to erase. I suspect that chalk causes no health problems. But volatile fluids, and whatever that ink is made from? I worry a bit about those. One of the things I saw in many student evaluations of my teaching was how much they liked the blackboard. (A lot of profs show slides, which is a disaster, in my view, for mathematical subjects.) The only good thing I can see about whiteboards relates to faculty replacement. It encourages people like me to take an early retirement and get the hell out of the place.