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I personally cannot fathom why anyone at all uses whiteboards. When I was at Caltech, we called our Physical Chemistry prof "Wild Bill Goddard" because he wore
by MichaelCrawford 11y ago
I personally cannot fathom why anyone at all uses whiteboards.
When I was at Caltech, we called our Physical Chemistry prof "Wild Bill Goddard" because he wore a cowboy hat and boots to his lectures. His course was largely conceptual, illustrated with balloon-shaped drawings of electron orbitals, drawn with 3-D projection in which the yellow and red were in the plane of the chalkboard while the pale blue projected in and out.
We all complained that we could not see the blue diagrams. "That's OK, you're not supposed to, that's why I use pale blue."
On night Sonja Benson and I snuck into the classroom to put the arm on his blue chalk. We took it down into the steam tunnels where she doused it with her hairspray, giving it a hard coating so it would not mark the board anymore.
The very instant Wild Bill saw what we had done, he cracked his blue stick in half then continued drawing orbital diagrams we were not meant to see.
- dasmoth 11y agoOne reason to prefer whiteboards: I find the feeling of touching chalk unbearable.
- ams6110 11y agoThere's also the occasional teeth-curling screech when a fingernail or little bit of hard matter in the chalk scratches the board. Even at that though, I think I prefer chalkboards.
- apricot 11y agoI teach math, and just as some people cannot taste the bitterness in Brussels sprouts, I'm not affected by the fingernail-on-blackboard noise. I find it very useful for taming a class of wild freshmen, though. I only have to do it once. "It finds the correct delta or else it gets the noise again."
- mrgoldenbrown 11y agoWhy did you need to take the chalk into the steam tunnels just to spray it?
- mikexstudios 11y agoHa, that must have been a long time ago. Around 2009 Bill would wear a beret all the time. I don't think his drawings were that detailed anymore, but his orbitals were still "pooched".
- panzagl 11y agoThe reason is dust.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago"The Reason is Dust" would make a good album name.