Northern Illinois University of DeKalb, Illinois, Honors Educators

Northern Illinois University reports that three educators will receive honors at the annual Honoring Teachers ceremony held at the Blackwell Museum, located in the Learning Center of Gable Hall on the NIU campus, just to the south of the Chick Evans Field House.

An explanation of each educator's contribution to the program will be read during the ceremony. Recipients of awards are Jennifer Wahlers, Donald Wahling and John Wredling.

As part of the display related to the festivities the artwork of 90 kindergarten children done in markers and crayon will decorate the walls of the museum. That project was created by Wahlers, who works in district 158, and teaches as many as 25 art classes per week. She will discuss her various projects and will explain the importance of one-room schoolhouses in Illinois history.

Lucy Townsend, curator of the museum, explains that at one time over 10,000 of these country schools existed in our state. Many of the buildings remain. They have now been converted to other uses like museums, homes or storage units.

The Blackwell Museum was started with a generous endowment from Ruth Blackwell, a former schoolteacher. The museum now has more than 11,000 textbooks, and in its special collections some books that are more than 400 years old. Various educational artifacts are on display, for example, ink wells, report cards, various historical documents, puzzles, primers, slates and desks.

A slate is a very small hand-held blackboard that students used to write on in the days when paper was very expensive or scarce. Slate is actually made from stone that can be separated into flat sheets. Usually the stone had a wood frame around it, but the earliest slates did not. Typically, they were used for math problems or spelling, or to practice penmanship. Just like a blackboard, slates could be easily erased and used over and over again, cutting down on costs considerably. Slates are still produced today, more often as toys than as educational tools. They have been in use in the United States since the 18th-century.

The museum runs and operates a one-room schoolhouse that was reconstructed. It is located to the south of the Recreation Center. It is just the kind of building in which the gentle clicking of chalk on slate would have been heard.

Walking through the museum and its collections one gets a very real sense of the materials used in education in previous centuries. It is appropriate that the museum is located in the learning resources center, because this is where students training to be teachers go to get materials for their projects and to check out equipment for use in their classrooms. The old is juxtaposed with the new, the ghosts of educators past look over the shoulders of educators to be.

Blackwell Honors Teachers, NIU