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The blackboard is a much more democratic, transparent, two-way tool: everything the teacher does the student can directly see and imitate. Watching someone reas

The blackboard is a much more democratic, transparent, two-way tool: everything the teacher does the student can directly see and imitate. Watching someone reason with a writing implement in hand is an incredibly valuable learning exercise, since effective technical problem solving is largely done that way in practice. Students should also be practicing solving problems directly at the blackboard, with the teacher and other students as an audience. (Writing on an overhead projector or some kind of projected ipad screen or something could be an alternative, but these are higher-tech for no real advantages in an in-person lecture context, and make it much harder for multiple people to participate together. Writing on paper is an okay substitute if there are no more than about 3–4 students per teacher.) A handout or slides or video is an opaque one-way tool, a prepared polished document that students can see but typically have no easy way to imitate. It affords the lecturer more chance to put effort in up front into making a clearer document, but robs students of the chance to witness their teacher doing some of the work in real time, and ultimately leads to a relative loss of basic problem solving skills involving writing/drawing, trading them away in favor of immediate gratification. Sometimes this trade-off is worth it (e.g. Grant Sanderson's work largely couldn't be replaced by blackboard lectures https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw ), but when the school's entire pedagogy moves that way, the loss is tremendous in my opinion, an erosion of some core tools of a centuries-old mathematical/scientific culture.

lisper 3y ago
> Watching someone reason with a writing implement in hand is an incredibly valuable learning exercise, since effective technical problem solving is largely done that way in practice. I vehemently disagree. Classroom lectures almost always present results that are already in the bag. I can't remember a single class where a professor actually walked us through the process of figuring something out. The closest I've ever seen is 3blue1brown, and he obviously doesn't use a chalk board. Nowadays technical problems are often solved by writing code, which is almost never done on a chalk board outside of job interviews.
- jacobolus 3y ago
  Even when chalkboard lectures present material that was prepared in advance, there's a significant difference vs. prepared material presented in slides or a typeset document or a video. Writing imposes a speed limit on the lecturer, and forces them to verbalize the whole reasoning process. In slides it is much easier to skip past the meat of the work, and much harder to be responsive in writing/pictures to questions and discussion. > can't remember a single class where a professor actually walked us through the process of figuring something out This can't really be blamed on the tool of the chalkboard. I promise you this does happen in some classrooms. It certainly happens all the time in informal discussion between professionals. In my opinion schools should strive much harder to induct students into a problem-solving culture than teach specific content trivia. A blackboard is an invaluable tool for the former. > often solved by writing code Writing code is a narrow and constrained tool with much less freedom than writing on paper, and thoughts made first in code are substantially blinkered in my experience compared to thoughts worked through on paper. Many of the best programmers I know do their most important work on paper (sketching, planning, doodling, drawing diagrams, ...) before ever touching the keyboard. And that is far more true still for mathematicians, physicists, etc. What is true is that many programmers are not very effectively taught to use paper to its full advantage as a tool for thought, and either never learn or largely figure it out on their own. Our typical computer science pedagogy is frankly terrible at this, and professionals' on-the-job training isn't much better.
  - lisper 3y ago
    >> can't remember a single class where a professor actually walked us through the process of figuring something out > This can't really be blamed on the tool of the chalkboard. That is true, of course, but that was not the point. The point is that blackboards do not necessarily produce, or even encourage, good pedagogy. The two things are largely orthogonal. > Writing code is a narrow and constrained tool with much less freedom than writing on paper Yes, I think this is a feature, not a bug. It enforces a certain amount of rigor that blackboards don't. Of course, the language in which the code is written matters a lot.
    - deleted 3y ago
BenFranklin100 3y ago
What are you going on about? There is no ‘reasoning’ or ‘problem solving’ going on in real time. The professor is transcribing an already prepared lecture, oftentimes literally with the prepared notes in one hand and the chalk in the other. Real problem solving is a tedious, nonlinear exercise with many dead ends and start overs. There is nothing in a prepared lecture for a student to imitate.
hyperluz 3y ago
Since there is no space inside my house, to put a decent sized blackboard and I don't have free access to one, maybe blackboards aren't so democratic as one would wish.
- broscillator 3y ago
  I think a blackboard is cheaper than any device that lets you view PDFs
- jacobolus 3y ago
  I have known people who lived in a run-down studio apartment or just a bedroom in a shared house who had a sizable blackboard or whiteboard. So this is clearly more of a personal choice about your space than anything inherent about the tool. But if you are by yourself or with 1–2 colleagues (not trying to explain to a group) you can certainly do the same work on paper. Reasoning through a problem on paper becomes unworkable when you try to show more than a few other people at a time, which is where the blackboard comes in.
andrepd 3y ago
Well it's silly to assume that these are mutually exclusive methods of teaching. As you well point out, prepared material on a computer can show things that you simply can't on a blackboard, things like visualisations, graphs, schematics, or other things that are either too tedious or impossible to write down on a blackboard and copy to a page. My rule of thumb is: screen for exposition, blackboard for problem-solving.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
If you want to learn writing, wouldn't it be much better to see someone write in a word processor, to write with the same tools that you will also use?
- jacobolus 3y ago
  No, a word processor is a very poor tool for reasoning through the solutions to technical problems, compared to paper or a blackboard. You need to be able to draw, doodle, make tables and charts, write with whatever symbols you can imagine, etc. Once you have a solution in hand, you can use computer drawing tools to make a polished version for publication. But that's a different problem than the original reasoning.
abdullahkhalids 3y ago
To positively add to your viewpoint, my experience as first a student and later a professor is that many students prefer slides/notes to blackboard because the former often gives them the perception that they learn more. Slides/notes are fixed content. It's also finite content that you have to learn. If you learn all that content, you have mastered the course. So, it's quite easy to assess how much you have learned. But slides/notes don't teach skills well, and teach even more poorly on how to think in the course domain. Books also do poorly at this. The only way to learn skills and ways of thought is, as you say, by imitation. The imitation happens on the blackboard, where a good lecturer thinks out loud, gets the students to think out loud with him, and hopefully transfers the rhyme and rhythm of the discipline to them. The 'problem' is that you can't really nail down concretely from a blackboard lecture what you are supposed to learn. Moreover, no matter how much you read the book, and master the content, you will always feel like you aren't thinking as well as the lecturer was. So you feel bad. Of course, if you let the pain drive you, you continue on your path of learning. If you don't, then blackboard courses feel horrible [1]. [1] A huge percentage, I would hazard, majority of lecturers are not of sufficiently good quality. Teaching is incredibly difficult. So, many blackboard courses, as do many notes/slides courses fail because the lecturer was just bad.
- BenFranklin100 3y ago
  I guarantee 75% of your students got lost along the way at some point, and — having lost the train of reasoning — are simply waiting for the class to be over so they can review the textbook and try to make sense of the subject matter. At least for difficult classes like physics and mathematics, which require uninterrupted thought and reflection to achieve understanding.

lisper 3y ago

> Watching someone reason with a writing implement in hand is an incredibly valuable learning exercise, since effective technical problem solving is largely done that way in practice. I vehemently disagree. Classroom lectures almost always present results that are already in the bag. I can't remember a single class where a professor actually walked us through the process of figuring something out. The closest I've ever seen is 3blue1brown, and he obviously doesn't use a chalk board. Nowadays technical problems are often solved by writing code, which is almost never done on a chalk board outside of job interviews.

jacobolus 3y ago
Even when chalkboard lectures present material that was prepared in advance, there's a significant difference vs. prepared material presented in slides or a typeset document or a video. Writing imposes a speed limit on the lecturer, and forces them to verbalize the whole reasoning process. In slides it is much easier to skip past the meat of the work, and much harder to be responsive in writing/pictures to questions and discussion. > can't remember a single class where a professor actually walked us through the process of figuring something out This can't really be blamed on the tool of the chalkboard. I promise you this does happen in some classrooms. It certainly happens all the time in informal discussion between professionals. In my opinion schools should strive much harder to induct students into a problem-solving culture than teach specific content trivia. A blackboard is an invaluable tool for the former. > often solved by writing code Writing code is a narrow and constrained tool with much less freedom than writing on paper, and thoughts made first in code are substantially blinkered in my experience compared to thoughts worked through on paper. Many of the best programmers I know do their most important work on paper (sketching, planning, doodling, drawing diagrams, ...) before ever touching the keyboard. And that is far more true still for mathematicians, physicists, etc. What is true is that many programmers are not very effectively taught to use paper to its full advantage as a tool for thought, and either never learn or largely figure it out on their own. Our typical computer science pedagogy is frankly terrible at this, and professionals' on-the-job training isn't much better.
- lisper 3y ago
  >> can't remember a single class where a professor actually walked us through the process of figuring something out > This can't really be blamed on the tool of the chalkboard. That is true, of course, but that was not the point. The point is that blackboards do not necessarily produce, or even encourage, good pedagogy. The two things are largely orthogonal. > Writing code is a narrow and constrained tool with much less freedom than writing on paper Yes, I think this is a feature, not a bug. It enforces a certain amount of rigor that blackboards don't. Of course, the language in which the code is written matters a lot.
  - deleted 3y ago

BenFranklin100 3y ago

What are you going on about? There is no ‘reasoning’ or ‘problem solving’ going on in real time. The professor is transcribing an already prepared lecture, oftentimes literally with the prepared notes in one hand and the chalk in the other. Real problem solving is a tedious, nonlinear exercise with many dead ends and start overs. There is nothing in a prepared lecture for a student to imitate.

hyperluz 3y ago

Since there is no space inside my house, to put a decent sized blackboard and I don't have free access to one, maybe blackboards aren't so democratic as one would wish.

broscillator 3y ago
I think a blackboard is cheaper than any device that lets you view PDFs
jacobolus 3y ago
I have known people who lived in a run-down studio apartment or just a bedroom in a shared house who had a sizable blackboard or whiteboard. So this is clearly more of a personal choice about your space than anything inherent about the tool. But if you are by yourself or with 1–2 colleagues (not trying to explain to a group) you can certainly do the same work on paper. Reasoning through a problem on paper becomes unworkable when you try to show more than a few other people at a time, which is where the blackboard comes in.

andrepd 3y ago

Well it's silly to assume that these are mutually exclusive methods of teaching. As you well point out, prepared material on a computer can show things that you simply can't on a blackboard, things like visualisations, graphs, schematics, or other things that are either too tedious or impossible to write down on a blackboard and copy to a page. My rule of thumb is: screen for exposition, blackboard for problem-solving.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

If you want to learn writing, wouldn't it be much better to see someone write in a word processor, to write with the same tools that you will also use?

jacobolus 3y ago
No, a word processor is a very poor tool for reasoning through the solutions to technical problems, compared to paper or a blackboard. You need to be able to draw, doodle, make tables and charts, write with whatever symbols you can imagine, etc. Once you have a solution in hand, you can use computer drawing tools to make a polished version for publication. But that's a different problem than the original reasoning.

abdullahkhalids 3y ago

To positively add to your viewpoint, my experience as first a student and later a professor is that many students prefer slides/notes to blackboard because the former often gives them the perception that they learn more. Slides/notes are fixed content. It's also finite content that you have to learn. If you learn all that content, you have mastered the course. So, it's quite easy to assess how much you have learned. But slides/notes don't teach skills well, and teach even more poorly on how to think in the course domain. Books also do poorly at this. The only way to learn skills and ways of thought is, as you say, by imitation. The imitation happens on the blackboard, where a good lecturer thinks out loud, gets the students to think out loud with him, and hopefully transfers the rhyme and rhythm of the discipline to them. The 'problem' is that you can't really nail down concretely from a blackboard lecture what you are supposed to learn. Moreover, no matter how much you read the book, and master the content, you will always feel like you aren't thinking as well as the lecturer was. So you feel bad. Of course, if you let the pain drive you, you continue on your path of learning. If you don't, then blackboard courses feel horrible [1]. [1] A huge percentage, I would hazard, majority of lecturers are not of sufficiently good quality. Teaching is incredibly difficult. So, many blackboard courses, as do many notes/slides courses fail because the lecturer was just bad.

BenFranklin100 3y ago
I guarantee 75% of your students got lost along the way at some point, and — having lost the train of reasoning — are simply waiting for the class to be over so they can review the textbook and try to make sense of the subject matter. At least for difficult classes like physics and mathematics, which require uninterrupted thought and reflection to achieve understanding.