The sign on the wall outside Bob Killingstad’s office reads “Math dept. dinosaur,” a colleague’s friendly jab at his 36 years of teaching at Everett Community College.
Truth be told, Killingstad is part of a vanishing species of instructors: He still uses chalk.
The math instructor believes in its power, the sound and rhythm of its strokes and its clarity – sensations and neatness he just doesn’t get with a felt marker on a slippery whiteboard.
Chalkboards, so long an image of public education and a trigger of childhood memories for generations, are rapidly disappearing from classrooms nationwide. They’ve hit the surplus heap with Latin books, film reels and ditto machines.
At EvCC, there remains a small group of instructors who covet the few remaining old chalkboards.
Killingstad walks into Room 108 at Index Hall and fondly wipes a dusty sheen with the bottom of his fist from the large green chalkboard where a single problem can fill the entire 24-foot-long expanse.
He nods reverentially toward the back wall, where there is an actual blackboard made of slate, a rarity in this day and age.
“I communicate heavily with words and chalk,” Killingstad said. “In mathematics, I’m getting feedback. I like that they see me unfold the problem the way they are going to unfold it.”
As passionately as he promotes the virtues of chalk in the digital age, Killingstad senses that its days are numbered.
“I think it’s a dead duck,” he said. “When they remodel, they are not going to put in chalkboards.”
Whiteboards far outnumber chalkboards in classrooms today, but they face competition from the next step in the evolutionary chain: the computer-connected whiteboard.
Some entire school districts have removed chalkboards from classroom walls in Snohomish County.
And they are hard to find in many others.
A survey of classrooms in the 5,400-student Stanwood-Camano School District found a lone chalkboard still attached to the wall. It is rarely used because there is also a whiteboard.
At Discovery Elementary School in south Everett, the old chalkboards have been covered with butcher paper and used for bulletin boards. The chalk has been recycled for use on the sidewalks, where students draw in the spring and fall during recess.
The Everett School District stopped installing chalkboards in its schools in the early 1990s, although there are quite a few still scattered around, mostly in the shadows of whiteboards.
Director Steve Burch has never seen anyone dip into the ample supply of chalk sticks at the Sno-Isle Tech Skills Center, a vocational campus in south Everett that serves more than 1,000 students from more than two dozen high schools.
There are no chalkboards there, except a 9-inch-by-9-inch board used for menus in the student-run restaurant.
That leaves Burch with six dozen boxes of chalk, containing 12 sticks each.
“I have been here nine years and I haven’t seen any used yet,” he said. “It would be nice to find them a home, and I’d throw in the erasers, too.”
Chalk has been used in cave drawings dating back to prehistoric times, according to archaeologists.
Chalkboards reached the classroom in the 1800s, first as blackboards made of slate.
Over the last 20 years, they have been supplanted by glossy whiteboards.
Greg Moore used to sell a lot of chalkboards until the fear of chalk dust getting into computers surfaced and the price of markers began dropping more than a decade ago.
“Chalkboards are dead,” said Moore, president of Best-Rite Manufacturing, a Texas supplier of school equipment.
In fact, Best-Rite Manufacturing was once known as Best-Rite Chalkboards, but the company diversified its product line and didn’t want its name to reflect a dying product.
“I’ve seen (chalkboards) go down a lot the last 10 years, probably 50 percent a year as a percentage of sales,” Moore said. “It’s just getting smaller and smaller.”
Whiteboards far outnumber chalkboards in classrooms today, but even the marker boards are getting nudged out by their technology-driven cousins, the interactive, computer-connected whiteboard.
The interactive whiteboard is a screen that not only connects to a computer and a projector, but also allows students to modify and “drag” what’s on the board by using a special pen or even their fingers.
“We project out our rate of growth against known classrooms and we think that most classrooms will have an interactive whiteboard within the next seven to 10 years,” said Nancy Knowlton, president of SMART Technologies, based in Calgary, Alberta. SMART is the world’s largest seller of interactive whiteboards.
In the Marysville School District, 164 classrooms – more than 25 percent of the district’s classrooms – now have interactive whiteboards. Two years ago, there were 14.
The district could slow its purchasing of the interactive whiteboards for a while, said Ken Ainsworth, the district’s technology director.
“We need to get good with what we have,” he said. “Before we invest any more money, we need to develop best practices.”
Even so, Ainsworth is in no hurry to return to the days of chalk.
“I kind of miss the days when your hands would dry up for nine months of the year and you develop those (chalk dust) allergies,” he said facetiously.
Some teachers, particularly in the early grades, aren’t ready to part with their chalk.
They aren’t Luddites, technophobes or even nostalgic. They simply argue that chalk still has a viable role in their classrooms.
Karen Richards, an occupational therapist in the Sultan School District, spent a lot of time and trouble finding mothballed chalkboards to have reinstalled in the rooms where she works with children. One was in a custodian’s office, the other in a warehouse.
Chalkboards are important as young people learn to write, she said.
Often, they are not developmentally ready to grip with their thumb, index and middle fingers and instead hold writing tools with more of a fist.
“The occupational therapy trick is to have them use very small, stubby writing implements because this way you have to hold it at the tip of your fingers and can’t use your whole hand,” she said.
Sensory feedback is increased with chalkboards, she added. The way the brain learns and remembers depends in part on how many senses are used in teaching it, she said.
With chalk, there is the visual sense, tactile touch and a sense of body position in space because of the pressure students have to exert on the chalk to make it move across the surface of the chalkboard, she said.
Chalkboards aren’t just helpful for youngsters learning to print their letters. They are also valuable in teaching older students cursive, which is a big change, said Lynn Fritzler, who teaches third grade at Lowell Elementary School in Everett.
Barb Tucker, a first-grade teacher at Marysville’s Sunnyside Elementary School, uses chalk, a computer and an overhead projector in her classroom.
She believes her penmanship is much neater with chalk.
“I know I can learn to adjust to many new things in this world of teaching, and perhaps I will stop using chalk sometime in the future, but (I) have no plans at this time,” she said.
Judy DeMarco, who teaches kindergarten at Pinewood Elementary School in Marysville, initially kept her chalkboard because she didn’t like the smell from markers. When markers were produced that didn’t have the pungent odor, she kept her chalkboard to save the school district money.
She uses an overhead projector along with the chalkboard and she even has a record player – “for ‘big CDs,’ as my kindergarten kids say.”
“I do not want to reinvest in new materials unless I feel the need,” DeMarco said. “I have learned that new doesn’t always mean better.”
Darlene O’Grady, an occupational therapist at four Monroe School District campuses, has similar reasons for keeping chalk around but is more adamant.
“I would chain myself to my blackboard to keep it,” she said.
Reporter Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446 or stevick@heraldnet.com.
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