In Isabella’s early days of teaching Sunday school, the blackboard was an innovation. In her books, Isabella often wrote about how intimidating the blackboard was for many teachers, and some refused to use it.
That’s what happened in her 1878 novel Links in Rebecca’s Life. In the story, a young woman named Almina had the charge of teaching young children their Sunday-school lesson, but she refused to use a blackboard:
“It is quite the fashion to rave over them … but I won’t have one. What could I do with it? I don’t know how to draw, and as for making lines and marks and dots … I am not going to make an idiot of myself. What’s the use?”
Isabella saw things differently. With inspiration from her old Chautauqua friend Frank Beard (creator of “Chalk Talks”), Isabella embraced the blackboard as a teaching tool, especially for her youngest students who were just learning to read.
Of course, not all Sunday-school teachers had Frank Beard for a friend and guide. And not all teachers had a talent for drawing and diagramming.
Publications like The Sunday School Times recognized that, and published “Blackboard Hints” in many issues of their magazine, showing teachers that simple lettered blackboard illustrations could be just as effective:
It was Isabella’s opinion that any lesson could be better taught by the use of a blackboard or a slate.
“Children are invariably more impressed with what grows into being before their eyes then with what is brought in a completed form before them,” she said.
In her Sunday school lessons, Isabella used pictures and objects whenever she could to illustrate her lessons, but she liked the blackboard better.
“I never attempt elaborate drawings. In the first place, I cannot draw anything. In the second place, but I would not if I could, in a Sunday school room. There is not time. The barest outline is all you can spare time for in all that you need. A blackboard used constantly throughout the lesson — a mark for this one, a dot for that, a crooked line for a river, and oval for a lake — that is better for an [children’s] class than a careful summing up of the lesson at the close.”
So Isabella often began her lessons by putting a dot or a simple symbol on the blackboard, just to get the attention of everyone in her class—at least until they found out what that mark was for.
“If I need such a dot or mark or line as the most mischievous and troublesome [child] there can make for me, I have won him as a rule for that day.”
You can learn more about Frank Beard and his “Chalk Talks” by clicking here.
You can read Isabella’s novel Links in Rebecca’s Life for only 99 cents! Choose your favorite e-book retailer. (Your purchase from The Pansy Shop helps support this blog.)
Isabella Alden 