…and other questions about the classroom we’ll answer if you just raise your hand and wait quietly at your desk.
Why does the school year begin around early September?
That’s an outgrowth, and a relic of, the nineteenth century, when millions of American families worked on or operated farms. Some districts would allow for a long, two- or three-month break in the middle of the calendar year so that children and teenagers could help with the harvest, and when that fell depended on when they were most needed to pick crops or tend to livestock. An area with a fall harvest might give students September and October off. Meanwhile, in large northeastern cities where the needs of farmers weren’t a concern, wealthy families would take their kids out school in the hot summer months and head to their more temperate country homes, in such large numbers that schools in New York and the like just started ending the school year in June. That group’s break became the standard as small farming faded from American life after the early twentieth century.
Why is the blackboard black?
Students in ancient Babylon wrote out lessons on clay tablets with a clay stylus, and they would clean them with water. By the eighteenth century, those had evolved into slates, tablet-sized surfaces made of real slate or wood covered in washable paint. As handy as they were, teachers couldn’t do a group lesson on such a tiny surface, so in 1801, James Pillans, the headmaster of Old High School in Edinburgh, Scotland, hung a large piece of slate on the wall at the front of his classroom and wrote on it with chalk. The idea spread through Europe and to the U.S., where black slate was inexpensive and readily available. While blackboards would evolve into more easily readable green boards in the 1960s, white dry-erase boards in the ‘90s, and computerized “smart boards” in the twenty-first century, we still call them blackboards.
What’s the origin of bringing a teacher an apple?
When settlers established small communities in the Midwest in the mid-1800s, they opened one-room schoolhouses for the educating of their children. The community would then find a teacher, usually an unmarried young woman, and because they couldn’t afford to pay her much, the parents of students would provide for her needs, building her a house and providing her with food. An apple for a teacher is emblematic of this era. A farmer’s child might periodically pay their teacher with a few ears of corn, or a crate of apples.
