Peanuts by Charles Schulz for February 11, 2016

Next she’ll give you the honorable task of clearing out the asbestos.

Are chalkboards still used these days? No need to clap clean erasers when it comes to marker boards.

The dreaded chalk lung claims another victim.

Many die, for honor!

In my parents’ day (1930s), apparently being sent out to clap erasers was more of a punishment…maybe a time-out. For me in the 60s, it was a privilege. We were sent out either alone or in pairs at recess time. The school was red-brick and if the erasers were particularly dusty, some students would make a design on the wall with the chalk dust.

The old felt erasers were a pain because they dirtied the board more than they cleaned it. The best were the foam-rubber ones that had a kind of chamois leather on one side. That really cleaned up the board and made it a pleasure to write on, but the teacher usually reserved that one for her own use.

Whiteboards are easier. Just wipe the ink away.

I remember that,but it would have been better just to wash and dry them

I remember being ask to do that back in the 1970’s.

My teacher would throw the chalk at students who were no paying attention! Worse than chalk duster duty was incinerator duty (emptying rubbish bins into the big incinerator)

My mother was a teacher in the same school I attended. After school, I’d go to her classroom, get the erasers, go outside and “clap them”. Then I’d go back and wash the blackboard of chalk dust. I loved doing that!

If we’re going to write on a board and then wipe it off, I’m not sure what made whiteboards and markers an improvement. The markers have to be thrown out, adding plastic, and chemically treated felt to landfills. Check tends to be used up until it’s gone- nothing to throw away. Sometimes we’re tricked into thinking something is progress just because someone tells us so.

In the 90’s I was teaching calculus at a mid-level college, and we used blackboards and white chalk. It used to get under my fingernails and the dust made me cough. I started to wear surgical gloves. I don’t remember ever asking any of my students (graduate level) to clap the erasers, so I think they never got cleaned.

You could give it to Zuko.

okay, so it looks like a bunch of you haven’t seen these. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Board My kid’s school has them in every classroom and the local school district is working to get it that way in every school..Basically, the only waste/upkeep cost is electricity, but they are a major investment.

I remember doing this when I was a kid. Most of us boys would hit the eraser against the side of the red brick building and spell out words. Maybe that’s where tagging came from.

In my grade school classes, washing the blackboards after school was considered a much higher honor.

But nothing beat wearing the white belt for being a crossing monitor.

It’s clapping the erasers together that makes it dangerous.You’ll die from the clap Charlie Brown.

I remember cleaning erasers back in those days; however, I don’t recall it being used as punishment…

One of the schools I went to was progressive, We used a vacuum cleaner to clean the erasers,

Clapping erasers was the best job in school! We’d get sent outside in pairs to clap the erasers, where we could talk all we wanted. It was like having an extra recess!

Literally

She should try that with Lucy as a sort of anger management technique. Not saying it will work though.xxx

I had several teachers who threw chalk AND erasers at students who would provoke them. I wonder what would happen now if a teacher tried to throw something at a student?

Charlie Brown looks just like Pig-Pen in the final panel! Speaking of Pig-Pen, we won’t be seeing him for another seven years — not until April 11 1976. It’s a shame that Schulz disliked Pig-Pen so much and never drew him, especially as Peanuts fans unanimously adore the character.

I remember eraser duty, too. And yes, our building was brick, and yes, we did patterns on them, too. I remember learning how to tell where to do the erasers so the dust in the air wouldn’t be much of a problem.

As a full-time teacher now, with whiteboards, I’ve learned that dry-erase erasers need to be cleaned regularly (carpet works well – though obviously you shouldn’t use the carpet under the whiteboard :) If you don’t clean the erasers regularly, they start spreading the ‘ink’ or whatever it is onto the whiteboard that even the official whiteboard cleaner can’t get off. So if you use a whiteboard a lot every single (school) day, they have to be replaced.

I prefer chalkboards (black or green) for many things, but whiteboards work better if you have a lot of colors of dry erase markers (or wet-erase markers), as versus the same number of colors of chalk.

When I was a kid in the 1960s we had a machine to clean erasers. It was sort of like the business end of one of those old Hoover upright vacuums that “beats, while it sweeps while it cleans.” It would not only vacuum the chalk off of the surface of the felt erasers but it would beat on them to get the stuff that got deep down. NOT for use with the rubber erasers!

Of course I lived in Saskatchewan. The “honour” of beating erasers against the side of the school is non-existent on a -40 day in February Chances are that no erasers would have been cleaned between the middle of December and the end of March without the machine.

We never had to do this at school. The erasers were always cleaned because we used them to throw them at each other. It was a mess afterwards, but it was fun.

I had a college professor who repeatedly and jokingly complained that he was going to get “white lung disease” from breathing in all that chalk.

Why were only boys chosen?