Cartophile

Gosh, I love maps. When I was at Ross Road Elementary I couldn't make heads or tails of what is was supposed to represent. I vividly recall being in the library and having teachers assist me with where to place stickers on the map of the word. I could get my head around this idea that the blue was water, the green was land, and some how this represented everything in a world too big for my own comprehension. There were pandas in the ocean, llamas in Europe, kangaroos in Asia, it was a mess.

Now I adore maps. The more I fill in the gaps of my mental picture of the world the more I get excited seeing maps and how they reflect the world. In school it just feel like random names that had to go one specific spots everytime and that was it. Especially maps of Canada seemed strange until I started to travel around. The dots for capital cities were always the same size, leading you to believe that Yellowknife is the same size as Toronto, which must be the same size as Victoria because all their dots are the same. NO! And I was convinced that Hudson Bay must be a centre for trade with ships crossing to connect big cities like Churchill and maybe even Ottawa! I thought that the Maritimes must be massive since there are so many provinces and cities in a small space. Oh how wrong I was....


Today's social studies lesson dived frther into the concept of maps. This lesson was only with The Democracy (the class that votes on things) I no longer teach The Dictatorship because of a schedule change -or a coup d'etat. We passed out blank maps and tred to see if students could get the right continents labeled. One student got 4, two got 2, and three got 1, and only one student got 0 because he used his time to colour the map istead.

At the end of the class we tried again. As much as I get a kick out of miss label maps, they had improved significantly.

But still, let it be known that most of the students believed that Korea was either in Europe or Africa.