Pop quiz!
Where, even though both the primary- and secondary-source readings for my U.S. history survey repeatedly used the word “Virginia,” did my students today think the Chesapeake is located? (And no, I don’t have any international students in this class.)
Leave your answers, as well as your favorite student geography blunders, in the comments.
(I’m going to have to start every class meeting this year with a geography lesson, yes? I feel really bad for my colleagues who teach non-U.S. history.)
Good for you! I’m guessing the answer to the question is all of the above? And are you assuming that they know where Virginia is? The good news is that, in my experience, college students if asked to memorize the locations of things, say for a map quiz, will mostly get 90-100%.
Many years ago, I assigned a piece by WEB DuBois to my classical sociological theory class. It was written in 1917 and was talking about the war and colonialism and so on. In the class where we talked about this reading, one of the students asked “Why does he keep talking about muddy fields in Belgium?” Why had it never occurred to me that the dates of WWI and the fact that much of the fighting happened in muddy fields in Belgium were not common knowledge?
Breena, I didn’t let it get that far. After the first student guessed Maine, and the second Massachusetts, and I realized it was going to take us a while to get down the Eastern seaboard, and we might pass through the rest of the East as well.
Jo, that’s troubling. Gah!
I don’t know–how many Mainers or Virginians could pick out (for example) Idaho or my large square state on an unlabeled map? All geography is local.
The most geographically illiterate college student I ever knew was my freshman year roommate, who was from Staten Island. On a geography quiz, she labeled NY as PA and vice-versa, which was strange to me since we were in college in PA and she was from NY, and so apparently didn’t realize that she traveled south when she went to college. She labeled Ohio as Kansas. But, I’m sure she was unrivaled in that class for reading a NYC subway map and for having memorized the schedule of the Staten Island ferry. . .
I recall that, when the latest Iraq war began, I had to show my college-attending tutoring staff where Iraq was on a world map so they could assure our anxious students that the bombs were not falling around the corner.