some people out there in our nation don't have maps

[naomikritzer]

The week before last, Molly brought home a map of Europe. For a classroom assignment, she'd traced a classroom map (in a Montessori classroom, the map you trace is called a control map; it's part of a set that also includes a puzzle map), colored in the countries, and labeled them. She hadn't quite finished it; the countries of eastern Europe were unlabeled, except for Russia and Poland. Which is why it took a few minutes (and Ed looking over my shoulder and pointing this out) to realize why it looked so strange.

Molly had traced a Cold War map. "Russia" was actually the USSR: Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Moldova, and Estonia were all missing. Czechoslovakia was carefully outlined (but unlabeled), as was Yugoslavia (all of the former Yugoslavia, not just that last little bit that was still called Yugoslavia until 2003). She'd also drawn East and West Germany, though apparently while labeling countries (using a more up-to-date map) she'd realized something was very wrong here, and she'd tried to turn East Germany into extra Poland.

I was appalled, and poked through the classroom stash of maps the next time I was in the classroom. The Asia maps were missing, so I couldn't check them for accuracy -- it turned out the teacher had loaned them to the classroom next door, which didn't have ANY maps. I pulled out the Africa map and checked to see whether it has Congo, or Zaire; I was relieved, if a bit surprised, to see that it was Congo. After I got home, I started thinking about this, and pulled up Wikipedia to check; sure enough, Congo was Congo before it was Zaire. I resolved to look at the map again the next time I was over there.

I was there today, and I took the map out and looked at it. It's not the Democratic Republic of the Congo that's on there -- it's the Republic of the Congo, which hasn't existed since 1964. Even if you shrug that one off (it's not like the third graders are going to remember whether the map says Republic or Democratic Republic -- heck, you could fix that one with a Sharpie) the map also has Rhodesia on it.

Just to clarify, these are not the fancy pull-down maps I remember from my childhood classrooms; these are actually really simple maps, made of stiff coated cardboard, so that kids can lay them down and trace the countries. They're not super-expensive, in other words; they're $8 each in the standard approved Montessori supply house catalog. (Puzzle maps are much more expensive -- $150 each. You can find discount versions around, but the teacher says they don't hold up to classroom use.) (Alas, the world map that Doctors Without Borders sends me every other month would not be useful in this context. Control maps are done with thick lines and minimal landmarks, to make them easy to trace.)

When I talked to Molly's teacher last week about the Europe map, I told her that I wanted to buy replacements, and donate them. The teacher was puzzled and a little defensive, even though I tried to make it clear that I didn't blame her. I think she looks around the classroom and sees SO many material deficiencies that a parent flipping out about antiquated maps seems really weird to her. But we all have our hot buttons, and seeing the USSR (and East Germany, OH MY GOD) on a map drawn by my daughter pushed a really big one for me.

It's prohibitively expensive to keep geography materials truly current in a classroom, because stuff changes constantly. I am okay with a significant margin of error here. But ... East Germany has not existed since 1991. That map is at least 18 years old. And Congo started being called Zaire in 1971. That map is older than I am. (And even if Congo is Congo again now, Zimbabwe is not named after Cecil effing Rhodes anymore. OMG.)

The saddest thing is that I bet these maps will not be thrown away when the new maps arrive; I bet they will be passed along to the teacher next door, the one who borrowed the Asia maps because she has no geography materials at all.

Comments

[gelsey.livejournal.com]

I've seen that a lot. I remember it still being that way in some of my classrooms when I was in school, though admittedly that was a longer time ago and more excusable then.

It really is deplorable how schools don't keep things remotely up to date because of funding. No one seems to care.

[corinnethewise.livejournal.com]

That's really responsible of you (and just a very unfortunate situation all around for the kids). My government teacher my senior year of high school never redid her handouts or tests. She made these things once (probably her first year) and never bothered to work on them again. We were instructed to make manual changes before filling in answers (such as taking Soviet Union out and replacing it with Russia, East and West Germany with just "Germany" or changing "the only president to be impeached" to "the only two presidents to be impeached") Yeah... this was in 2004. (She was kind of just a bad teacher all around though).

I also like that Molly tried to make East Germany into extra Poland - Ha, Poland expanding into Germany for once!

And the last... my friend went as Miss Teen South Carolina last Halloween. :)

[naomikritzer]

Wow to your government teacher. That's appalling. Though at least with high schoolers, you can reasonably expect that they'll be able to make the relevant changes.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's awful. Because... okay, unless Minneapolis has had charter schools with special educational options much longer than anywhere else, wouldn't those maps be older than the school?

And also: okay, I will never complain about reference books still having the brontosaurus in them again, because in comparison that is so, so petty.

[redbird]

There have been Montessori schools for a long time.

Nonetheless, I would suggest Naomi check the catalog before ordering new maps, to make sure they've been properly updated. (The best check for Africa is whether Eritrea is shown as an independent country. I think that's actually the best global check at the moment.)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Right, but if I'm not mistaken Molly attends a public Montessori charter.

[redbird]

Sorry, my misunderstanding (which may have come from answering so early in the morning, and was definitely fueled by the age of the maps).

[naomikritzer]

It's a public montessori magnet -- not a charter. I did some digging and it looks like the school was created in the mid-1960s, so these maps may be original to the school.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Microsoft once accidentally omitted Poland from a time zone map. (See nonnihil's icons.) It's totally bizarre-looking, in a slow-dawning way.

Anyway, good on you for getting maps. Is there an active PTA that might rally to help update other classroom supplies?

[naomikritzer]

My favorite weird Microsoft mistakes involve the calendar. Like Microsoft Easter, which fell on a Tuesday last year, IIRC.

There is an active PTA, and they have a pool of money that they use to give grants to teachers to buy whatever materials the teachers consider most urgent. Geography is not a major priority at this school in E1, which is why this stuff is so antiquated. Anyway, the teacher says she'll write a grant for new puzzle maps next year.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Holy sh*t. East Germany? Rhodesia??!

I suspect you're right about what will happen to the old maps. Is this a situation where you could mobilize a group of parents to contribute enough for new maps for all the classrooms? (I say this, of course, with no idea of how many classrooms there are...)

[naomikritzer]

1. There are a TON of classrooms. Like, eleven E1 classrooms (that's grades 1-3).

2. Many of the E1 teachers don't teach geography at all. It would be silly to buy those teachers updated maps.

The PTSO actually has a pot of money that teachers can write grants for -- which is a reasonable way to do it, honestly. The teachers have a lot of autonomy at this school, so different classrooms have different emphases.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Holy cow. Yeah, that would be silly. (I had in mind my daughter's school, which has 400-ish students about 20 classrooms from Junior Kindergarten through Grade 8.) But ... Rhodesia.

[imponderabilias.livejournal.com]

Well, at least they're looking at and using maps. I'm not sure that my first grader has had any geography at all. They just don't introduce it until later grades.

Which reminds me that I forgot to quiz my son on the capitals of all the South American countries for his test today. I learned that Surinam became Suriname from his homework.

[naomikritzer]

A lot of the classrooms at this school don't really do geography.

I'm not honestly sure whether it's better to do geography with atrociously outdated materials, or to leave it for a later grade.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not sure mine gets any geography either. Or if she does, it doesn't seem to be taking -- she knows the names of a bunch of provinces, but tends to forget that Canada isn't one of them... We use maps a lot at home for wayfinding around the city, but that's a totally different kind of map use.

[riverrocks.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of a required history class I took in high school (in the middle 1980s) where the text book that billed itself as a comprehensive survey of American History ended with V-E Day because it was published in 1949. Not only was it sorely out of date, it was poorly written with many appalling errors and biases. My father, who had a degree in American History, spent an entire weekend reading it and ranting about the various fallacies my school was teaching unsuspecting teenagers.

It wouldn't have been unsalvageable if the teacher had been any good (the other history, who I had for the first half of this two semester course, handed us the text books on the first day, told us to leave them in our lockers and informed us that we were expected to attend all the classes and take notes as the tests were based on his lectures and not the "school board approved paperweights"), but this teacher seemed more interested in collecting truly horrible ties than actually teaching us anything and his method of instruction was to have us paraphrase the textbook as homework and then memorize our corrected homework and write it out verbatim for the texts. The only way I passed that class was by doing the extra credit oral history interviews about living through the Great Depression and World War II with twenty of the people living in the senior citizens high rise across the street from my house (my grandparents and their friends and some people from my father's church).

I don't know if it's the Midwest or the country in general, but unless it happens to be a personal passion, my experience is that not a lot of attention or money are spent on teaching/learning history or geography. I'm not sure how to change that, but I do know that I have a better understanding of how things are now (and how to work to change them for the better) the more I know (the truth of) how we got here.

[naomikritzer]

It's the U.S. in general (and to be honest, it's not just the U.S. -- plenty of other countries are just as bad). Have you ever read "Lies My Teacher Told Me"? It's about the horror that are American history textbooks.

None of my high school teachers used the history textbook. Even the football coaches who were teaching history because the school was full up on gym teachers didn't use the textbook.

[lydamorehouse]

Personally, I kind of miss the U.S.S.R. if only because the Soviets made such great TV/movie villians.

Also, I'm a little bitter because I blew a trivia quiz question at my favorite coffee shop because I'm old. The question was: in what country was the first space launch? My answer: Russia. The reason answer: Kazakhstan. Which I think was just a cheat, since when I was a kid all that stuff was just Russia, even if they were the Soviets, you know?

(I am, of course, kidding. All apologies to my Latvian and Estonian friends, of which I have at least two.)

[chamois-shimi.livejournal.com]

I sort of fell in here by accident (you know how it is, someone comments somewhere, you click a link, you click another) ... and I suppose it's indicative of my essential DIY nature, but do any of the PTA folks (or spousal or other familial units) have scroll saws and the knowledge to use them? DIY wooden puzzle maps! Super sturdy!

And a reasonable amateur artist ought to be able to replicate country outlines ...