It’s hard to walk into a Yale classroom without seeing laptops or iPads in front of everyone. Surprisingly, this has not decreased the use of blackboards. Professors still use boardwork to teach. After classes end, Yalies work and run meetings in empty classrooms, using the blackboards for scratch work, planning and even doodling. 

The blackboards are never cleaned on time. The white chalk marks are always preserved past midnight. Thus remain the difficult physics equations, a busy Yalie’s schedule from early December and cute drawings of cats and flowers. 

The uncleaned blackboards offer a sneak peek at Yalies’ lives. The uncleaned boards are like Yale’s dreams, a resurface of Yale’s subconscious. This subconscious is shown to the full extent at night, when nobody else is looking, until the next day, when other humans of Yale walk in, wipe them off and leave on the blackboard new stories of their lives. 

Photos by Karen Lin and Zoe Berg