Quotes about blackboard

A collection of quotes on the topic of blackboard, writing, problem, teachers.

Quotes about blackboard

“What is studied is a system which lives in the minds of economists but not on earth. I have called the result “blackboard economics.” The firm and the market appear by name but they lack any substance. The firm in mainstream economic theory has often been described as a “black box.””

Ronald H. Coase (1910–2013) British economist and author

And so it is.
1990s and later, "The Institutional Structure of Production" (1992)

Study, Appearance, Box

“Teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Children, Imagination, Teachers, Joy

“Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson.”

Ann Beattie (1947) Short story writer, novelist, professor

Source: Walks with Men

Love

“To write and speak correctly is certainly necessary; but it is not sufficient. A derivation correctly presented in the book or on the blackboard may be inaccessible and uninstructive, if the purpose of the successive steps is incomprehensible, if the reader or listener cannot understand how it was humanly possible to find such an argument….”

George Pólya book How to Solve It

Source: How to Solve It (1945), p. 207

Books, Understanding, Success

“It took only a few days to block off the little room on the third floor back of the Piquette Avenue plant and to set up a few simple power tools and Joe Galamb's two blackboards. The blackboards were a good idea. They gave a king-sized drawing which, when all initial refinements had been made, could be photographed for two purposes: as a protection against patent suits attempting to prove prior claim to originality and as a substitute for blueprints. A little more than a year later Model T, the product of that cluttered little room, was announced to the world. But another half year passed before the first Model T was ready for what had already become a clamorous market…”

Charles E. Sorensen (1881–1968) American businessman

Source: My Forty Years with Ford, 1956, p. 97 ; As cited in: EyeWitness to History (2005)

World, Idea, Drawing

“If Atheism writes upon the blackboard of the Universe a question mark, it writes it for the purpose of stating that there is a question yet to be answered. Is it not better to place a question mark upon a problem while seeking an answer than to put the label "God" there and consider the matter solved? Does not the word "God" only confuse and make more difficult the solution by assuming a conclusion that is utterly groundless and palpably absurd?”

Joseph Lewis (1889–1968) American activist

The Philosophy of Atheism

God, Question, Problem, Universe

“In this business one becomes a connoisseur. I can now see that [Jim] Carrey is a virtuoso, [Chris] Farley is at least hard-working, [Adam] Sandler is hopeless and Pauly Shore bypasses all categories to achieve a kind of transcendent fingernails-on-the-blackboard effect. His appeal must be limited to people whose self-esteem and social skills are so damaged that they find humor, or at least relief, in at last encountering a movie character less successful than themselves.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/jury-duty-1995 of Jury Duty (12 April 1995) <br class="br">Reviews, One-star reviews

People, Business, Success

“Writing wasn't easy for her. It wasn't like arithmetic, not like a column of numbers to be added or subtracted from the top of the blackboard to the bottom, neat and organized; or science, figuring out the why of things.”

Patricia Reilly Giff (1935) American children's writer

Source: Water Street (2006), Chapters 11-20, p. 65

Science

“The film has written and spoken dialogue in twenty-five languages-English, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Latin, Hebrew, necrotic Egyptian … and it has written calligraphic text on paper, wood, and flesh, on flat and curved surfaces, vertically and horizontally, on both living and dead flesh, in neon, on screens, in projection, as sub-title, inter-title, and sur-title, as High Art and low art, as advertisement and banker's check and registration plate, on photograph, on blackboard, as letter correspondence, as photocopy facsimile, and spoken, chanted, and sung, with and without music … a mocking challenge. You want text? Cinema wants text? Cinema pretends to eschew text? Then we can give you text to mock that smug suggestion that cinema thinks it is pictures.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

"105 Years of Illustrated Text" in the Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 5 No. 1.
105 Years of Illustrated Text

Art, Music, Thinking, Dead

“We have a president who apparently loves instability and revolution, and that is the antithesis [pointing at blackboard] of those two words, "Social Security."”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

2011-02-23
Glenn Beck
Television
Fox News
2011-02-24
Beck: "We Have A President Who Apparently Loves Instability and Revolution"
2011-02-23
Media Matters for America
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201102230041
2011-02-24
2010s, 2011

Love

“There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. Von Neumann didn't say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann.”

George Pólya book How to Solve It

2nd ed. (1957), p. xv
How to Solve It (1945)

“During my first year at Berkeley I arrived late one day to one of Neyman's classes. On the blackboard were two problems which I assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down. A few days later I apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework - the problems seemed to be a little harder to do than usual. I asked him if he still wanted the work. He told me to throw it on his desk. I did so reluctantly because his desk was covered with such a heap of papers that I feared my homework would be lost there forever.
About six weeks later, one Sunday morning about eight o'clock, Anne and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door. It was Neyman. He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: "I've just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication." For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about. To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard which I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them.”

George Dantzig (1914–2005) American mathematician

Dantzig (1986) in: D.J. Albers and C. Reid "An interview with George B. Dantzig : the father of linear programming". In: The College Mathematics Journal Vol 17, nr 4, 1986, p. 293-314.

Fear, Idea, Problem, Thinking

“At an ink-stained desk, with his chin cupped in his hands, Titus was contemplating, as in a dream, the chalk-marks on the blackboard. They represented a sum in short division, but might as well have been some hieroglyphic message from a moonstruck prophet to his lost tribe a thousand years ago.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 4, section 2 (p. 410)

Dreams

“We are like figures which some great demonstrator draws upon the blackboard of Time. A problem is to be solved, without doubt; what the problem is, we, the figures, cannot know and do not need to know; all we know is that sooner or later we shall be sponged off the board and other figures take our places, and the demonstration go on.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Preface
The Light of Day (1900)

Problem, Time, Drawing

“Do you expect teachers to draw on the blackboard, how to wear a condom? This would be surely embarrassing to our teachers. The curriculum must be changed to suit Indian conditions.”

Prakash Javadekar (1951) Indian politician

On a new sex education course, as quoted in " Sex education runs into trouble http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6949714.stm", BBC News (22 August 2007)

Teachers, Change, Drawing

“It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs.”

Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Prologue, p. 5
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

Change

“Who would stand before a blackboard, and pray the Principle of mathematics to work out the problem? The rule is already established, and it is our task to work out the solution.”

Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) religious leader

Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1889), p. 491 https://archive.org/stream/healthwitscience00eddyrich#page/491/mode/1up

Mathematics, Problem

“[Dubuffet marvels at the desert as a chaotic palimpsest, filled with marks and signs].. like an immense notebook of disorganization, a notebook of improvisation.... an elementary school blackboard full of scribbles..”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Quote of Dubuffet, in a letter to Jacques Berne mailed from Algeria, late 1940's; (Lettres à J.B., p. 35.); as cited in 'Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut', Kent Minturn http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Minturn/Dubuffet-Levi-Strauss.pdf, from RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 46, Polemical Objects (Autumn, 2004), pp. 247-258, p. 250 <br class="br">1940's

School

“Riding the crest, I diversified, exploiting a highly marketable capacity to fart at will… By mastering this skill I set myself on a par with those court jesters of old who could wow the monarch and all his retinue with a simultaneous leap, whistle and fart. Unable to extend my neo-Homeric story-telling activities from the playground to the classroom, I could nevertheless continue to hog the limelight by interpolating a gaseous running commentary while the teacher addressed himself to the blackboard.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Source: Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980), p. 105

Teachers

“Traslation: Now it happens that turtles are great speed enthusiasts, which is natural.
The esperanzas know that and don't bother themselves about it.
The famas know it, and make fun of it.
The cronopios know it, and each time they meet a turtle, they haul out the box of colored chalks, and on the rounded blackboard of the turtle's shell they draw a swallow.”

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer

'Ahora pasa que las tortugas son grandes admiradoras de la velocidad, como es natural. Las esperanzas lo saben, y no se preocupan. Los famas lo saben, y se burlan. Los cronopios lo saben, y cada vez que encuentran una tortuga, sacan la caja de tizas de colores y sobre la redonda pizarra de la tortuga dibujan una golondrina.'
Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Color, Nature, Time, Drawing

“The APT and CAD Projects had one Air Force sponsorship, but it was actually a combination of about five or six projects, all going in parallel on both hardware and software matters, and I couldn't keep track of things, so I would take Polaroid pictures of the blackboard and then say what we had talked about into my dictating machine and my secretary would type it up.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: Retrospectives : The Early Years in Computer Graphics at at MIT, Lincoln Lab and Harvard (1989), p. 26.

“Archie waited a beat- in strict command of the room, the silence almost unbearable- and said, "Everything in Brother Eugene's room is held together by screws. The chairs, the desks, the blackboards. Now, with your little screwdriver- maybe you'd better bring along various and assorted sizes, just in case- you start to loosen. Don't take out the screws. Just loosen them until they reach the point where they're almost ready to fall out, everything hanging by a thread…" A howl of delight came from the guys- probably Obie, who had gotten the picture, who could see the house that Archie was building, the house that didn't exist until he built it in their minds.”

Robert Cormier book The Chocolate War

Source: The Chocolate War (1974), p. 35

Guy, Silence, Waiting, Housing