Furniture for daily life: school slate? ie. a piece of slate on which you learned to write with a slate pencil before progressing to paper and a pencil and. once a copperplate handwriting was approximated- a ball point pen. Older people may remember ink- the school desks still had a hole for this-into which my neighbouring classmate would put the numerous flies he killed daily with a slap to his face. Worse than the pigtails into the ink stories I was told to appease my 8year olds objection to this hideous practice. on Teak Garden Furniture and Teak Indoor Furniture