Your mobile phone chimes, you answer it and you hear a lot of crackling sounds on the other end. In between, you hear a loved one."Where are you?" you ask.
"In the car."
"At the dentist"
"In Costco--don't know why the reception is so bad".
You meet a handsome Brazilian soccer player in an airport lounge. Sparks fly. You exchange contact information. Now he knows that you are @gmail, but besides that you are a mysterious citizen of the world.
Okay. I did not really meet a Brazilian soccer player at the Jet Blue terminal at SFO. But I could have. Or not. The point is that people now define their geography digitally or by where they happen to be at a particular moment, rather than by city or state or even "go down a dirt road and make a left at the red barn."
Teaching has made me most aware of the shift. At first I thought it was just the international students who were having difficulty figuring out that California borders the Pacific Ocean. This semester it was also a revelation that California is one of fifty states in the United States which is one of three countries on the continent of North America. The fact that Mexico is part of the continent of North America baffles most. And many from China, which has long had friendly relations with Cuba, thought that Cuba was right next to Mexico. To a person they thought that Los Angeles was part of Silicon Valley--after all, it is only an hour away by airplane. And of course, they did not bring warm sweaters or waterproof shoes to face the chillier Northern California winters-and thus joined the other freezing tourists at the windy Golden Gate Bridge, getting ripped off buying fleece jackets at $100 a pop.
But it is not just the international visitors who are geographically challenged.
Consider the following conversation between me, a Mom, and an eleven year old boy that I am tutoring in Menlo Park:
Me: You might want to get a wall map of the US or the world or an atlas or even a globe--because D thought that New York was next to California. It helps to understand US history and world history if you know where countries and states are. located physically.D: Yeah Mom. I didn't know that there were two places with the name Washington. What's the difference again?
Mom (slightly embarrassed): Oh cmon D, you know this. Washington is where the senior trip goes.
I know that many middle schools have students memorize the names of all fifty states and even do an exercise in which they fill in the state names on a blank stencil of our nation. But still, the kids lack an understanding of what the border connections mean. Even with history classes and "mission projects" many Silicon Valley grade school kids born in the U.S. don't understand why, for example, so many people in California speak Spanish.
I keep a large laminated map of the United States in my English Language Learning classroom at Menlo College. I also have large word maps in the classroom. We refer to them frequently. They help me, too. One of our students is from Mongolia and before she arrived I would not have been able to identify the nation on a blank map of Asia. Could you?
In an age of virtual locations and digital global coordinates and the voice in the car that tells you where to turn--we are losing an understanding of local and international geography.
We all laughed when Alaska's Sarah Palin said that she could see Russia from her house.
But how many of us really know how close parts of Russia are to Alaska? Or that we bought Alaska from the Russians in 1867?
One thing that I fear in this lament about lost geographies is that I sound like the teacher who misses the old days of cursive writing and math calculations by slide rule. Do we actually need geography or atlases or globes (I know that I am old when I confess that loved to spin the globe that I had as a kid and land my finger on distant places).
Have you been to the crafts and antiques stores that sell old maps for collages and art projects? Is geography a dead study like, well, Latin?
I asked young people to comment on my Facebook page about whether geography is dead and so far they have not. This might be because young people no longer use Facebook. My peers who still use Facebook have weighed in with the importance of geography in understanding trade deals, border walls, the military, American elections. art, the environment and many other cultural understandings and misunderstandings.
I do think that we have to teach geography in more innovative ways than memorizing the names of our American states and filling in the blanks.
I start my English language learning classes, regardless of the age of the student, with the question: Where are you right now?
Because if you are an international student in a new country with a teacher like me barking at you in English, you probably are wondering where the hell you are and why you ever left home.
Some students say that they are in the classroom. Some answer: the United States. Some say on Instagram or WeChat.
So far, no one has said "on earth". But if interplanetary travel succeeds, they might.
I also request: SHOW ME where you are.
Students can use words, photos, videos and images.
And I think they enjoy this exercise.
I have taught them the word and concept "feedback"--but they are still in the early stages.
WHERE ARE YOU?
I think that as a starting point, teachers, should ask that question to ALL of their students, regardless of age or nationality or subject.
Then, of course, there are the more difficult follow-ups
How does your location connect you to others?
How does your location disconnect you from others?
