Spice of Life | Chalking out new course on good old blackboard

At one of the recent conferences, I was surprised to see my co-speaker come without a PowerPoint presentation. How could someone even imagine speaking without it! In the past two decades, this has become almost the norm.

Instead, my friend and colleague when called to the stage, pulled up the screen and got it folded, rummaged through his pockets, and came up with a couple of chalks, with which he wrote the title of his lecture on the good-old blackboard that lay hidden beneath the white screen and, I must say, the audience, comprising mental health professionals from all over the country, listened intently and with interest right till the end of his presentation.

This incident took me back to the time I was in school, where the blackboard used to be the centre of learning. It would come to life, quite literally, with the teachers scribbling and underlining the “must-know” points on it.

The same blackboard would actually break into a riot of colours when our biology teacher would use coloured chalks to draw a diagram of the cell, the foundation of life. She would come to school an hour before the first class in the morning, and would draw the diagram before the students trooped in.

The blackboard was our window to solving the tough-looking mathematical problems or the physics’ numericals. It was our eye into the outer space from the solar system to the Milky Way.

The quintessential blackboard was in a different avatar in college, where it was in the form of a long black sheet that was mounted on pulleys, one at the top and the other at the bottom. There was a handle at the bottom by which the blackboard could be moved upwards. This modification offered the advantage to the students of the content written on it staying for a longer time before it had to be erased.

The teacher would actually have his/her hands full of chalk powder and would walk out of the lecture theatre with the satisfaction of a job well done. We, as students, too would come out with the awe of having witnessed a new vista of knowledge, quite literally, built word-by-word before our own eyes.

Does this experience of teaching or being taught compare with the PowerPoint presentations of today, equipped with the most elaborate texts, captivating pictures and videos? The power of artificial intelligence (AI) is knocking on our doors, promising to revolutionise the way concepts are understood and facts laid out. I dare say, the good-old blackboard may still emerge as a winner, only if we have faith in its uncanny ability to impart knowledge in its multiple hues.

The writer is a Jalandhar-based psychiatrist and can be reached at gulbaharsidhu@rediffmail.com