My first teaching job was in 2009, at a public high school in New Orleans. I was hired as the science teacher two days before the school year began. Here’s me: an earnest, lanky, white kid, about fifteen minutes older than my oldest student. My oldest student: a parent, an emcee, a Katrina refugee returning to school for the first time since the storm. But I didn’t know this yet. All I knew, walking into the empty classroom for the first time, was that the space somehow needed to serve as a working lab. I took stock. There was good natural light: wide, colonial-style windows made up the south-facing wall. The panes were cracked, but intact. I turned off the overhead fluorescents to see if it was dark enough to use a projector. Immediately, I heard a banging from the other side of the wall. It turned out that Mr. Hooks, our school counselor, maintained his office in the adjoining closet, and my classroom switch governed his light as well.
A chalkboard spanned the wall opposite the windows, looking like it had weathered rain and sun and maybe laceration. It peeled in great, green flakes when you tried to write, chewing up chalk in the process. I thought most clearly with a writing implement in hand. It calmed my nerves when I spoke in front of a class, like a songwriter who only feels fully clothed on stage while holding a guitar. When my implement proved useless, it had the opposite effect: Fake-ass chalk. Fake-ass teacher. More, the rotting chalkboard seemed like another wall-sized slap in these students’ faces. Schwarz was the city’s expulsion campus. Don’t forget what folks think of you, the pockmarks mocked. What was I doing to say otherwise?
A tiny triumph came that fall. I received a small grant to install a twelve-foot magnetic whiteboard over the peeling paint. Truthfully, I didn’t receive the grant; a donor reviewing applications felt so badly for our circumstances they wrote to say they’d sponsor the whiteboard anyway. My principal interrupted class when the delivery truck arrived — the biggest cardboard box any of us had ever seen. And inside? Our gleaming canvas, rare and clean as an ice skating rink. That evening, I drove to the OfficeMax in Metairie and picked up four multicolored packs of Expos, enough markers for everyone in class to use at the same time. Anything felt possible.
This would not become Good Will Hunting. We cracked no intractable equations in my three years at Schwarz. I question now whether any real change even occurred. Plenty of students remained hungry at home, harassed at school; worse. But the aluminum rim of the whiteboard seemed to hold some of the chaos at bay. That sounds ridiculous to say. How about this: the whiteboard at least allowed us to be the authors of our own chaos. Bohr models, lyrics, a list of local mechanics for a student seeking an apprenticeship. Epitaphs invariably appeared along the board’s edges, inked when I wasn’t watching: “RIP Curtis…Trell…Oscar…” Taken together, all the day’s markings reflected back something like a portrait. Or, an ultrasound — a few pulsing glimpses of what you won’t see on the surface, of something needing healing or preparing to be born.
Ten years after the whiteboard, I got to sit in on a workshop with Lynda Barry. I was a student again and Barry was in Tuscaloosa as part of the university’s visiting writers series. She passed out blank index cards to thirty or so of us sitting in our middle school style desk chairs. I wish I could remember the song she had playing. Something irrepressibly upbeat.
Our first instruction was to draw a border inside the index card. In minutes, we’d sketch self-portraits as dinosaurs, as vegetables. Impossible comics riffing on someone else’s scribble. Everything quick, quick. Every index card starting with a border. If you’re familiar with Lynda Barry’s work, you know her life-giving belief that there’s a kid-artist in there (in you!) somewhere that just needs permission to make bad art. And this border-drawing practice, it has, like, some talismanic power to keep the critic, the endless list of things to be done, the endless list of things I think others think of me — the chaos — at bay. It all still exists, but out there. On the card, the chaos gets to be utterly your own.
Part of the permission to be a little less precious with one’s drawing, with one’s writing, comes with the great reassurance that there’s another index card at hand. You warm up. You mess up. You start again. Barry’s own books are alive with just this kind of freedom. No image, no sentence, no page has to live up to some imaginary, stultifying standard; not on its own. Each just has the grace to be. And so it becomes, in the company of other images, sentences, pages — a book. A wild work of art.
Erasing a whiteboard is fundamentally different from, say, mopping the floor or vacuuming a carpet, which both feel a lot more like clean-up. It’s closer to what I imagine it’s like driving the Zamboni across the ice, making tight passes, transforming scratches back into glass. You get the rink ready so you can play again.
Schwarz didn’t have a bell system. Classes could balloon in length due to lockdowns, or because the hall staff forgot to knock on the door and signal a transition. The whiteboard saw some action these afternoons. When the knock finally came at the end of the day, a few students periodically hung back. Once everybody else had left, they’d ask if they could help erase the board. When was the last time you tried it? Not a lunchtray-sized whiteboard propped up on your desk. Not smearing the marker with your fist. I do this too. I’m talking about returning a whole, might-as-well-be-a-mural surface to glistening concrete.
On the days the buses wouldn’t wait, and the students didn’t stay behind, the erasing fell to me. There was something about it — gliding the felt across the surface to reveal – just like that – a clean slate.
Josh Dugat is the author of the poetry collection Great and Small (Able Muse Press, 2025). He lives in Tuscaloosa with his wife and kids and teaches at the University of Alabama.