Chalk Boards

My children are sooooo deprived!

When I was young, we didn't have white boards. At home we didn't have anything that we could erase (except pencil on paper). At school we had chalk boards. These were mostly deep, dark green, but some were black. They had a slightly rough texture - just enough that running your fingernails over them produced an extremely annoying sound that drove most teachers crazy. For some unknown reason, this noise affected few, if any, of the boys. You can't get that sound out of a white board.

Just like a white board, though, when you were done, you had to erase the chalk board. Unlike the white board, erasing the chalk board produced a large amount of chalk dust. After only a few uses of the eraser, it was so full of chalk dust that it could not erase well. The teacher would get a volunteer to take a couple of erasers outside to bang them together (like beating a rug) to get the dust out. Most of the boys volunteered, but that was just to get out of the classroom. None of us minded the dust if it gave us the chance to miss a little bit of class. But banging those erasers together produced enormous clouds of dust - choking, smothering dust. The wise student learned how to do this wihtout having most of the dust blown into their faces. The unwise learned quickly. Some of us refrained from volunteering when there was no wind at all, since that meant the dust cloud had nowhere to go, thus enveloping you in a deadly haze, from which one returned only with permanent breathing issues.

When someone says in a movie, "like fingernails on a chalk board," my children just don't get it.
When a boy in an older movie has breathing problems, I think chalk dust, while my children think weak lungs. My children are sooooo deprived!