Classroom Letter Board Quotes

One day the teacher walks into her classroom and notices that someone has written the word PENIS in tiny letters on the blackboard. She scans the class looking for a guilty face. Finding none, she erases the obscenity and begins class. The next day, the word PENIS is written on the board again, this time in bigger letters stretching about halfway across the board. Again, the teacher looks around in vain for the culprit, erases the graffito and proceeds with the day’s lesson. Every morning for nearly a week the trend continues, and each day the word appears in larger letters. Each day she rubs them out vigorously. At the end of the week, the teacher walks in expecting to be greeted yet again by the offending word. Instead, she finds this: “The more you rub it, the bigger it gets.

To me, the board has always been profoundly three-dimensional, an effect enhanced by the chalk dust which drifts up from the tray, or is inadequately removed when the slate is washed, so that its normal blue-black monochrome is full of subtle variations, grays which suggest faraway galaxies or a nebula's gaseous clouds. And when I begin to draw a line across a freshly cleaned section, my hand follows the chalk in, as though like fish it swam there, and then, in the curve of an encircled word, it returns toward its source, and the simpler surface of the classroom world. That may be one reason why I lose my way while spelling the most common terms, for the letters will not remain in a row on the same plane as they do on the page, but sink or rise or float away, becoming curlicues and bows of string, whorls of suspended weed in which I lose all sense of the word's original identity.