It was a blast, hitting them against the brick wall outside and watching the chalk fly. Later in my school years I recall some sort of machine that would brush the erasers and suck the dust into some vacuum bag.
We loved doing it. But our school had electric eraser cleaners – a rotating brush, sort of like a circular saw, with a vaccum to suck up the dust. You’d run the eraser over the brush and it’d be clean in a minute.
We never swept up that I can recall but once I had to stay in at recess and write “I will not talk in class” 100 times. I think that was 4th grade. That was public school.
I lived close to my elementary school and usually stayed after school to clap erasers and wash the boards. I was a teacher’s pet.
Treat here too. My daughter’s school doesn’t even have chalk boards. I guess it’s a thing of the past.
We had punishments such as having to stand in the front of the classroom holding a dictionary in each hand or getting swatted with a ruler on the knuckles. I never suffered any punishment for any reason in school, being a perfect angel.
Male. Catholic School. 12 Years.
The good girls got to clap erasers. In the spring. Out back. With the June Bugs.
The rest of us got to diagram sentences. Thank Og it wasn’t Hemingway.
Back in Catholic grade school we were supposed to go outside and clap them together. I remember a couple girls getting in big trouble because they opted to pound them against the side of the school on the bricks. The way the nuns carried on you’d think they just spray painted “GOD SUCKS!” on the side of the building. Even thinking back now I have no idea what got them so worked up. It was freakin chalk dust.
Yep, clapping erasers was a prize doled out to students eager to go outside and make big clouds of dust (i.e. all of us).
Y’aint figure out what got the nuns all worked up? Pretty much anything that undermined their regime!
:eek: <<< What one’s face would look like upon being grabbed by the ear.
Nah, when I was in grade school the teachers’ preferred method of punishment was to make the entire class suffer for one student’s behavior, thus ensuring that kid got his ass kicked at recess.
:mad:
It was neither a prize nor a punishment when I was at school. Just a task for which all the students were rostered one week per annum.
That’s how I remember it- the old nuns made it seem like a treat for good kids!
Mine too. Plus the school had this vacuum thing designed to help you clean the erasers. It worked great on the wool type erasers, but not so much on the ‘spongy’ type erasers.
You had electricity?!
My school had this, and cleaning was a reward. I only got to do it once or twice but I remember it being awesome. I seem to remember it made a cool noise.
My Catholic grade school had the exact same machine. Yep, as I remember it two students had cleanup duty on a rotating basis on Fridays: erase and sponge down the chalkboards, clean the erasers, straight out the desk rows, empty out the wastebasket into the incinerator chute (still remember the smell, I wonder how much longer after 1985ish the school kept that thing running). Everyone had to do it and it was never assigned as punishment.
It was definitely a treat at my school, but even as a teacher’s pet I only got to do it once or twice. It seemed to be a task that the teacher saved to reward the “bad” boys for being good for a change. Smart teachers!
It wasa reward if you got to do it while other kids were doing yucky school work. It was a (mild) punishment if you had to do it during recess while everyone else had fun.