The Magic Blackboard at Longfellow Elementary School (March 8, 2014)

An old coot learned his lessons well at PS-13
by Merlin Lessler

She walked to the blackboard. It was the biggest one I’d ever seen, stretching across the entire front wall of the room. She reached into the tray, picked up a piece of white chalk (no yellow in those days) and wrote Mrs. Shopper across the top. It was just squiggles to us; we couldn’t read. It was our first day in school, kindergarten at Longfellow Elementary on Binghamton’s south side.

I walked there with my friend Woody, under the supervision of his older brother Stu and my older sister Madeline. We took the “long” way, up to the top of my street, Chadwick, along Moore to Pennsylvania, and down to the school that sat on a plot of land now occupied by a UHS sleep disorder and neuro-diagnostic facility. The short way, which we took every day after that 1^st one, was on a path that started in my back yard, meandered through a wood lot, past an abandoned metal hulk of an old farm truck, skirted around a small frog pond and up a hill through an overgrown hay field coming out where Brookfield and Aldridge meet.

I still remember that first day, the bully that pushed me aside at the sandbox and yanked a fire truck out of my hands, but the thing that dominates my memory, is the “magic slate where Mrs. Shopper wrote her name and then turned to us, like every teacher in every grade after that, and said, “I’m your teacher, Mrs. Shopper.” And, added, “That’s my name,” knowing we were illiterate and would be for at least another year and a half. That’s why we were there. Her job was to get us started: the ABC’s, counting, telling time, tying our shoes and enough socialization skills to prepare us for real schooling. Little by little, that long piece of slate, and others like it, converted the mush in our skulls to knowledge. It was a low-tech device yet it was all that was needed. It was a magic slate! The primary tool in a teacher’s arsenal.

But, it wasn’t just academics that came from that inert piece of slate; it had the power to hoodwink an entire classroom, an entire school. It had us chomping at the bit to do chores of the sort we took great pains to skip out of at home. It started when Mrs. Shopper turned from the board one day, after weeks of us gaping at her as she slowly and deliberately moved the eraser back and forth on the slate, mysteriously removing all her carefully drawn symbols (kids were pretty naïve back then) and asked Delbert Geragosian (the tallest kid in class) to come to the front of the room to clean the board. We were stunned, but not Delbert. He never had a problem grabbing the brass ring. Flying to the task, he aped her methodology, carefully and slowly removing all traces of the morning’s lesson. He proudly strutted back to his desk, indifferent to the 18 jealous, yet secretly thrilled classmates who surrounded him. Jealous, because he was the one who had been selected, but thrilled because we had been in school long enough to know the ropes. Our turn would come soon enough, probably in alphabetical order.

The trap had been set and sprung. For the rest of my confinement at PS-13 (as we referred to Longfellow), I never saw a teacher erase a blackboard at the end of a lesson; it was always a kid. And, as we had speculated, the tradition of picking a student at random was short lived. After a month of it, an alphabetical assignment list was posted off to the side of the blackboard, putting us on equal footing with the teacher’s pets. We could recognize our names by then. The list was one of many. Everything was controlled by a list: leading the pledge to the flag, starting the morning prayer, cleaning erasers and washing the board, both of which were performed after the school day ended. And even though I spent all day waiting to break free of my confinement in that brick prison, when it was my turn to do either of those two chores, I eagerly stayed behind as the rest of the class rushed to freedom. Now I understand how easy it was for Tom Sawyer to get his friends to whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence.

Erasers were cleaned on a special device in the school basement. It was a strange contraption bolted to a bench with a crank attached to a rotating brush. When you turned the crank the brush swept across the eraser, agitating the chalk dust and blowing it into a hooded bin. Washing the board also entailed a trip into Mr. Vanick’s (the kindly school janitor) subterranean headquarters. We filled a dented galvanized pail with water and grabbed a sponge from the bin. It was my favorite chore. Like magic, it restored the board to a pristine, black luster. Tom Sawyer’s con job had nothing over the scam pulled off by the all-female staff at PS-13. I loved being called to the blackboard, except when it was to write, fifty times, “I will not throw paper airplanes in class ever again,” while the rest of the kids rushed out to the playground for recess. I learned so much from that simple piece of slate. But as important as the academic lessons were, those blackboards taught me even more about human nature. That was the real magic!

PS - 13 circa 1954

Wood (left), Me (right) last few days of freedom before starting school.