Head of School's Message: December 5

I have only so many sports-watching calories to burn. My misgivings with a corrupt FIFA, the obscene staging costs, and the tragic losses of life during stadium construction led me to quietly boycott the coverage, well, most of it. After missing out on qualification in 2018, I felt obligated to watch the US Men's National Team in their opening round matches. On Wednesday, the game against Iran was on TV in the middle school library. A group of teachers and students gathered to watch the second half during the middle school lunch break. 

 

After the US victory, one of the students asked me who the US would play next in the knockout round. I told him that the next game was against the Netherlands on Saturday. He asked me what I thought of our chances, and I said the Dutch were good but not as good as they used to be. The student replied, “But I thought you said we were playing the Netherlands.”

 

This week, I invited Chandler teachers to share examples of geo-witlessness or geo-illiteracy. History Teacher Andy Hulm wrote, “When covering the unit on ancient Greece, an image of the desert and the Great Pyramid of Giza appeared on my screen. I said, "whoops, this is Egypt, let's move on to Greece." One student replied, "well, it's all on the same continent."  Also, we were talking about the cradle of civilization that was based around present-day Iraq. When I explained that this was in Asia, I had a lot of confused 6th-grade faces and some didn't seem to believe that the Middle East was on this continent.” 

 

Pete Carlson, Director of the Innovation Lab, had this experience, “Several students over multiple grades made arrows pointing to different cities around the world for Heritage Week. They researched the distance, but they struggled to determine which way the arrows should point when we made the post. To get a reference direction, when asked to point north, the most common response was to point straight up to the sky!”

 

5th Grade Teacher Chloe Todman, an Australian, asked her students where they thought she was from. One said, “The UK!” when Ms. Todman told her she was from Australia, the student replied,

“Oh well, I was close. It’s all Europe.” With their upset victory over Denmark, Australia made it to the knockout round losing out to Argentina and the great Lionel Messi on Saturday. I kept a lazy eye on the game.

 

Geographical illiteracy potentially has serious consequences. According to the website Geo-currents, in 2014, just after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, a Washington Post survey found that only 16 percent of 2,000 Americans queried could locate Ukraine on a world map. The Post discovered the survey showed that the fewer Americans knew about Ukraine’s location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene. 

We need to hang world maps in our kitchens and keep globes on our coffee tables or in our dining rooms. They make good presents. A good exercise to start with would be to locate on a map or globe the 32 countries participating in the World Cup, or at least the quarter-finalists. Cardinal points of a compass should also be parts of basic geographical literacy. Kids need to know that Mexico is to the south, not down there, and Canada is to the north, not up there. 

Both failed to make it out of the group stage, and the US lost to the Dutch on Saturday.