Are you smarter than a 7th grader?

Last week I subbed in a social studies 7th grade classroom.  The kids were working on an assignment using an atlas.  It was about basic atlas-reading skills--nothing fancy at all.  I was horrified by the frightening lack of basic map skills in these 12- and 13-year-olds.  It almost made me cry.

It made me think about a quote from To Kill A Mockingbird.  After she gets in trouble in 1st grade for already knowing how to read, Scout reflects and tries to remember when she learned to read.

"I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church-was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills To Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow--anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."

This is precisely how I feel about map reading.  I don't remember anyone purposely teaching me about maps.  Just as Scout absorbed reading from her dad, my own father did the same thing for me with maps.  I have always known how to read a map, and it is all because of my dad. I remember watching his finger running over the map as he showed me the state of Utah, and also as he spun the globe teaching me all about our world.  He taught me the directions, what all the lines, dots, symbols and numbers meant on maps.  When we would go on a road trip, my dad would give me a map and a marker to cross out the exit numbers as we passed them.  When we went on a trip, there was nothing much interesting going on inside the car (aside from 5 kids and lots of great '60s hit music), and so I looked out the window to see what all those things that I saw on the map actually looked like.  To this day--or night--when I travel in a plane, I must have a window seat so that I can see the earth below me and guess where I am based on what I know from having studied maps all my life.

I feel like I have always known the names of continents, oceans, states and mountain ranges.  I am a map freak.  I can sit and stare at a random page in a world atlas for hours, trying to memorize everything on the page.  I'm a geography freak.

The 7th graders I taught last week did not share my passion for geography.  They were stumped by basic questions in their assignment.  For example, when looking at a map of North America, they were supposed to answer the following questions: What are the two largest countries in North America?  What is the southernmost country in North America?

The had no idea what the difference was between a city and a country.  Their most common answer to the first question was---Texas?  And the southernmost country?  Well, that had to be Miami, right?

As I walked around the class answering questions as they worked, I can safely say that 90% of the kids raised their hands to tell me they did not know the answer to the above two questions.  It made me sad. I was heartbroken.

By the time I was in 7th grade, I knew every state and its capitol, country on the globe and its capitol, and every county in my state and the county seat.

I came home and asked Savanna if she knew the answers.  Of course she did.  She is a map-loving girl like her mom.  Then I asked Zack.  He also knew the answers.  He loves maps.

And just to make myself feel better that the future is not entirely in jeopardy, I got our big floor puzzle map of the world out and asked Zack to do it with me.  He knew the names of the continents.  He knew the names of the oceans.  He found Belize.  He found China, Russia, India, Hawaii and Madagascar--all on a map with no country names on it.  Then I taught him a few more just for my own sake.  Ask my kid where Papua New Guinea, Puerto Rico or Mongolia is.  He will show you.  He is six.

Just don't ask a 7th grader at our local middle school.