Under the Button is part of a student-run nonprofit.

Please support us by disabling your ad blocker on our site.

Oh No, Teacher Trying to Draw With Trackpad on Virtual Whiteboard

centripetal

Photo by Darrion Chen / The Daily Pennsylvanian

Everyone loves physics professor Randy Blamie. He is always able to explain the concepts very conceptually, using theoretical conceptual analogies to make the concepts easier to understand. He once compared voltage to having an anvil dropped on your head. Or was that current? Anyway, he’s good at explaining things, but only with his voice.

Whenever he picked up a piece of chalk to write on the board, the students in the lecture hall would scramble. Some put on sunglasses. Some squinted. Some just closed their eyes. Other, braver students just stared at the whiteboard directly. Professor Blamie began to write on the chalkboard. The chalk teared into the board, revealing a raw, jagged equation. He explained it as the equation of universal gravitation, and the students listened. The only students that saw it with their eyes were the ones that kept them open. But now, they had to wait another week for their eyes to heal before they could face another of Blamie’s horrific scratchings. 

When classes were put online due to the Airborne Toxic Event, Blamie’s students thought they had a break. No longer did they need to endure their professor’s claw marks. 

But on the first day of online classes, Professor Blamie caught all of his students off guard when he began to screen share and, to the students' horror, drew a picture and the equation for centripetal acceleration

“I think everyone in that virtual class was blinded,” said Engineering freshman Felix Rosewater. “It’ll take at least a couple days for any of us to recover.”

PennConnects