One of the best things about summer vacation isn’t the relaxed
days or the backyard barbeques or lazy afternoons lounging at the
pool, it’s the lack of geography questions.
Let me explain.
One of the best things about summer vacation isn’t the relaxed days or the backyard barbeques or lazy afternoons lounging at the pool, it’s the lack of geography questions.
Let me explain.
I’ve always been, what some people would call, geography-challenged. Oh sure, I can find my way to work or the grocery store or to the mall and places like that without getting lost. But I can just forget about trying to find any place 50 or more miles away.
And, truth be told, all these years, I’ve been fine with that. Then my son entered second grade. Apparently, along with learning about dinosaurs and multiplication this is a grade that’s big on geography. Every week my son would bring home a worksheet with several mind-boggling questions like, “Where is Sri Lanka?” Or: “What state is Washington DC next to?” Now, I’m not saying that this isn’t good information to know. After all, I’m a big advocate of both parental involvement in the schools and in knowing your geography. But when confronted with the issue of The Layout of the World, I’m the sort of person whose mind goes completely blank.
That said, no self-respecting parent should ever admit that they don’t have any idea where a whole country might be. I mean, it hurts your street credibility. Before you know it, your kids will be questioning your authority on all sorts of other topics like what, exactly, constitutes a decent bedtime hour, the importance of eating vegetables or the appropriate age to drive a car.
So basically there are two choices when asked a geography question that you don’t possibly know the answer to: 1) Pull out an atlas, find the page with the world map, then run your finger down it and hope that Sri Lanka magically lights up. 2) Take a wild guess and say in your best I’m-in-charge tone, “Why, it’s right over the Equator, north of Cambodia and slightly southeast of Aruba.”
The good part about the second option is that you get to work in bonus geography words like “equator” and “southeast,” which adds to your credibility. The bad part is that, well, it’s not true.
After a lengthy process of trial and error, I now use a combination of both. I pull out the atlas and say loudly, “I know where (Madagascar, Barbuda, the Congo, France, you-fill-in-the-blank) is. Where do YOU think it is?”
I’m not sure why I’m so geography-challenged. It’s not like we’ve never traveled out of state before. But maybe it’s because I don’t really pay attention. As a passenger I’m quite happy to play the license plate game and sing bawdy playground songs with the kids as the states go whizzing by me. Oh sure, I’m not completely an idiot. I mean, when we finally arrive at the Grand Canyon, I know we’re in Arizona. Which I know is right next to New Mexico, which is somewhere near Texas, which is only one state away from Tennessee, which is practically next door to Washington DC. I think.
But now that we’re in summer vacation, I don’t need to worry about all that. I could care less about where they decided to put Estonia or Abu Dhabi or Denmark.
All I need to worry about is how to get to the beach. Which is, as I recall, somewhere near Sri Lanka.
