8th Grader knowledge of geography
 

Hey, all. I posted this in the lounge, but thought I'd copy my thougths over here in the US:


I just attended an 8th grade Geography Bee at my son's school. Only two kids from each social studies class got to participate. In each class, they had a mini-competition, and the 2 best got to go.

I was amazed at how short the competition was. In my district, that brags about some of the highest SAT scores in the state, and is in the top 3 in our county, the kids seemed to get very, very basic geography questions wrong.

One question asked in what New England State is Lake Winnes(sp?). The answer given: California.

The first question was: in what Rocky Mnt. state is Grand Teton NP. Only 2 of 30 kids got this right. Half the kids did not know that Grand Canyon is in Arizona.

And now I will fess up about my son's performance. He believes he made it b/c he plays PS2 World Cup Soccer and each time you pick a team, you see a graphic detailing where the country is, its capitol, etc. So he knows a lot about European, South American and African countries. Also, every time we fly I get out the inflight magazine and point out where we're going and where we are.

We were IN Grand Teton NP two summers ago and he got that question wrong! He heard "Rocky Mnt" and immediately thought Colorado. (But we've done 3 loop trips of Colorado and never saw Grand Tetons then!) At least he knew Grand Canyon was in AZ, and he's never been there.

My son got eliminated on the only US question I didn't know the answer to. What state did Lewis and Clark winter in at Fort (didn't even recognize the name). The answer was North Dakota.

Sad on many levels

It's Lake Winnepausauke, in New Hampshire, spent lots of summers there as a kid.

Ok I'll fess up don't know what state the Grand Titons are in, will have to look at my globe. Also wish I knew more about Canada and Mexico, we didn't get much geography in school.
Umm, I have encyclopedias, I'm gonna give myself a few lessons. Thanks for posting this.

As a cynic, my guess is Geography is not on the SATs, so schools don't make as much effort to teach it.

I knew all of those without having to google! Go me! My teachers must have done a good job...

That is too bad, but maybe the school/district can use this to realize where they need to improve. You might want to speak to the principal regarding it.

I have sort of an opposite experience with the Geography Bee's. Our son has won them for the school for 2 years in a row. The first year, he was a 5th grader, so for the elementary school. Last year he was a 6th grader and won it for the entire middle school (6th,7th, and 8th graders). He also qualified on the test to compete at the state level. He didn't do so hot there, but hey, to make it to that level we were quite proud.

He won for his class this year, and is currently waiting to compete at the school level, which should be within a week or two. Wonder if he can keep his streak up?

I will say that our family travels and my husbands military deployments have really given him an edge with the other students in these competitions.

Hi karens, sadly it is not just our children that often do not have the geography knowledge that they should.

Suggestion, buy your son a good world globe. Also buy him a good world atlas. That is what we did for our daughter and consequently she had a much better understanding of geography then most of her friends.

She is an adult now, a mother of teenagers..well one son is now twenty. And last year I purchased her a new world atlas for a present as that is what she asked for. Her sons have always taken an interest also since a lovely world map has hung on her hallway wall for years. This Christmas my two grandsons and I spent over an hour on the floor with their mothers new world atlas looking at where various countries were and which continent they were in. It was fun!

Actually, it is Lake Winnipesauke..sometimes spelled with an additional "e" on the end.

I assume a public elementary school, but in the not too distant future,
and a few years in the military and they'll learn lots of geography.
M

In my experience, I've been chagrined to encounter more than a few people (of various ages) who confuse Yokohama and Oklahama. True story.

OklahOma obviously!

Mike--Not all public schools are bad.

"We were IN Grand Teton NP two summers ago and he got that question wrong! "

Don't feel too bad, Karen, my son blew the question "What is the southernmost state?" just a couple of months after visiting Hawaii (NOT Florida, which is what he said).

I strongly suspect that 8th graders/13-year-olds just aren't their sharpest when performing under pressure in front of a crowd including parents and peers.

As calculator use escalated, the ability to do math in the head declined. by the same token, as availability of information on the internet escalated, we saw a corresponding drop in the "need" to memorize things like geography. Look what happened to penmanship! Does anyone write cursive anymore now that we SMS and type?

But this is what the population, or should I say big business wants- focus on reading and math and science. NCLB doesn't give credit for geography or history, so if you want the emphasis changed to actually educating our children rather than studying for useless tests, let your elected representatives know.

I panicked for a second because I thought you were at OUR geography bee today.....

Our Bee consisted of students in grades 5-8. A 7th grader won but one thing to rememeber is that some schools (including ours) break up geography and history over various grades. One question that we had related to Lewis and Clark and my 8th grade social studies teacher remarked, "it is really frustrating because we are doing Lewis and Clark next week in class so she would have had the right answer." I don't think these type of competitions are always a good barometer of curriculum because they have to cater to a variety of schools but I know that in our school, our students have shown more of an interest this year in geography since we started doing the Bee. Just my thoughts.

Fort Mandan

My husband was on a Southwest flight home last month and sat next to 2 kids traveling by themselves, not related to one another. He taked with them for most of the trip.
My husband picked up the napkin that has an outline of the USA on it and started talking geography with the boy. He started quizzing him and he was shocked to learn that this 8 year old did not know hardly any states. This boy thought Idaho was "Italy".
This was a perfect opportunity for me to tell me husband, "see JUST how much of a learning experience travel is for our kids!" I think he now understands how beneficial it is on all levels.

One quirky way to teach geography is to get one of those "map of the world" shower curtain liners. Beats reading the back of the shampoo bottle while waiting to rinse out your conditioner ;-)

My DD has come in 3rd place school-wide (900 kids) in her GeoBee the last 2 years. This year's question that tripped her up was "What is the most widely spoken Chinese dialect?" She took a shot and guessed Cantonese, when the answer was Mandarin. (She chose her answer because she has friends who speak both, but more of them speak Cantonese.) She was shocked at how little her peers know about geography.

Oops, hit post too soon. I think, in addition to travel, that having friends from many ethnicities helps quite a bit.

Also, in my kids' elementary school, there is a big, colorful map of the U.S.A. painted on the blacktop, with all of the state boundaries and postal abbreviations. They used to play a game called "State Tag". I forget now how it worked, but at the time I thought it was a great idea to help learn about U.S. Geography.

I'm not a big fan of the NCGA laws Barbara mentions, but I am a firm believer that school based education is merely a start. Parents bear an equal, if not greater responsibility for teaching their children. Be it through life experiences like travel, active participation in the child's classroom, reading, word games, etc.

It should be remembered as well that 8th graders dating back to time immemorial are well known for forgetting just about everything they've ever learned. How many of us have watched our articulate elem school kids turn into monosyllable adolescents?

FYI - NCGA is my renaming of the NCLB to mean "no child gets ahead", as in teaching the tests, and teaching to the lowest common denominator. So many schools have taken away electives and enrichment programs just because of NCLB it's a shame. my 2c

my son was required to take world geography/history as a sophomore in high school. I don't think they learned any geography except all 50 state capitals (I had already made him learn that at about age 10) and they stopped history around 1400!

A society does end up getting what they value. This knowledge is not valued, as it is considered rote knowledge you don't "need" to know.

What is considered more important has been mentioned. But the depth of most any subject is just skimmed now, IMHO.
It has to be fast bites, and the recall is short for most because there is no context to connect it with and to.

It's not just public, private or who teaches, it's also the total amount of knowledge.

But Geography and History have taken the worst splats overall, nearly everywhere.

Reading for pleasure, as travel, gives lots of context for place and time etc. Oh for less of the electronic visual and more of plain old reading.

What is much worse than not knowing geography, is the lack of critical thinking knowledge that develops from the practice of being applied. And from what I hear, that's not just in the USA either.

Listen to this. I just went and asked my 16/ almost 17 year old the Grand Teton NP was in. He nailed it, and we did go there 3 1/2 years ago. Then I asked my 57 year old DH. He answed Montana. LOL, there is hope for the younger generation's geographical knowledge.
I alway did better than DH with the Geo questions, because of my dad spending time showing me globes and road atlas.

Hit send before I could edit. I'm sorry for the grammar issues.

The answer is we are simply not teaching our kids enough. Somewhere along the line someone decided either that our kids are stupid and/or that it's easier not to teach them very much.

I attended PS 135 (New York City public elementary school with well over 1000 students) - which was in a middle class area and had a very limited number of kids with learning problems or who did not have English as their first language.

But we did have 35+ kids per class and there was one teacher per class. No aides, no assistants, no tutors, no special programs.

And in the fifth grade we each had to do a social studies project (make an in-depth presentation with map including population, industries, system of government, major rivers, mountains etc) on a country we picked - so the whole class was exposed to fairly detailed knowledge of at least 30 countries. I remember that I had to do Argentina and wrote for info from the mission to the UN as well as books from the library, National Geographic, etc.

Is this no longer done? We were all able to do it without any trouble - and obvsiouly were not all Einsteins? Why aren;t children doing this now (with reduced class sizes, teachers aides, tutors, computer resources etc)?

And we had to learn all the states and their capitals in the 4th grade.

The world is becoming more complicated - not less - which means kids need to learn more and learn it sooner. We know that the average human uses only a small part of their mental capability. Why can;t we do better? And why aren't parents demanding that their children (and their schools/teachers) do better?

And yes, geography is only the tip of the iceberg. How many graduate then need remedial reading in college? How many can't do enough math to make change? How many can't speak a single sentence in a langauge other than their own?

Unfortnately - we're failing many of our children miserably - by not requiring of them what they're going to need to live successful informed lives.

This is just the tip of the iceburg, what really gets me is the lack of math skills!
Heaven forbid if you give a clerk change with your dollar bills "after" they have already typed in the register how much cash you gave them, unless the computer tells them how much to give you back they cannot figure it out at all.
I just told my husband about the question on the TV show 1 VS 100 tonight.
The question was how many 6 packs would it take you to have 99 bottles of beer.
Your choice of answers were a)over 15, b)exactly 15, or c)under 15.
The lady had to ask the mob for "help" because she couldn't figure it out, then she got help, picked the correct question and on top of that 20 people in the mob got it WRONG!

I am Australian and live in a rural area - I was astonished to discover from a 10 year old student that he had done well in his Geography Test - even though he had misspelt each answer. When I queried this he told me the teacher had said as long as he knew the correct name of each place the spelling did not matter -

Schools are definitely not perfect, but I think that opens a door for many things. If there are concerns, speak up. Volunteer. Be a mentor. Whether you have children or not, the schools can use any help they can get. I have been tutoring and volunteering in our schools for 11 years and have seen how it can impact the kids.

Not to mention being multilingual.
M (SMdA, Gto.)

Oh, and I remember when mine were Duke Scholars for getting some SAT threshold score as seventh graders (1000 or 1050).
I'll never forget returning from the recognition ceremony at Baylor and speaking with a DISD 7th grade teacher (in a tire store the same afternnoon)who told me her entire day involved trying to keep the childen in their seats as they had/have no self control.
Education in that environment was/is impossible.
M

My son was bummed out in the 7th grade because he was absent (sick) the day they did the class competition for the G. Bee. He probably would have done well, I think, because we always did geography games in the car as we traveled. When the kids were young we did states and capitals, along with looking for license plates. Later we moved on to naming rivers, mountain ranges, cities and countries on other continents, etc.

My DH loves geography and is good at it, so we would have a hard time thinking up questions that would challenge him. We would have to ask him to name six famous rivers in Europe and the major cities on each one and other such questions. I also came up with: If you were to fly from Copenhagen to New Delhi, name each country you would fly over. We were never sure if his answers were correct, of course!

He was on Jeopardy and missed a geography question: What is the third longest river in Africa? That is one fact that neither of us will ever forget.

I have had some fun with geography games on the internet. I liked the one where you had to drag the state (in the U.S.) or country (in Europe) into position. Your kids might enjoy some of those. I'm afraid that teaching our children geography is going to have to be one of OUR jobs, and maybe history too, since often U.S. history today is a list of all the mistakes our founding fathers and mothers made.

When X-mas shopping I saw the coolest toy at Target...I am a geography junkie and always have some kind of map up, etc. But anyway, it was on the "leap frog, learning" toy aisle and it was a globe with a wand and you touch any country and it tells you the capitol or facts or you can play games where it asks you to find places etc. I must have stood there for 20 minutes playing different games and considered it for myself LOL...it was the best tool I'd seen yet for learning geography...

I'm concerned - but it's up to the parents to see their kids get a good education. My beau paid for his daughters to get a quality education - but most people don;t have - or in many places need - that option.

They need to take more of an interest (or - if they don;t want to be bothered - don;t have children).

Why blame the schools? Even though I agree with many of the statements here about school and priorities, geography's a pretty easy thing for parents to teach their kids at home.

One of my favorite things when I was little was my map of the US puzzle, the kind where each state is one piece. We also used to play "the map game"-my dad would give us a location and we'd have to find it on the map (this could be a US map, map of Europe, Africa, whatever). They also used to involve us in vacation planning by giving us maps and having us plan different routes there. We loved this kind of stuff, and we all grew up knowing our geography.

A fun game at home. Quite easy, have a piece of paper and pencil for each person. Whoever list all 50 states first wins a prize. Just one simple way to get children involved. And one can then move onto harder questions. But it can be fun and involve a lot of laughter. Teaching children various things does not have to be all about being serious..make it fun!

I loved geography. In about the fourth or fifth grade, you could give me a plain piece of paper and I'd draw the US, plus all the state lines within in. Then I could add a star in the approximate location of each state capital and label them. (Of course there were only 48 states, so I guess it would be a little harder now) LOL.
But I really don't think the average adult is any better at most of this stuff than the average 8th grader. I'm appalled when friends say things to me about geography.

I agree with nytraveler about the country project. Two of my favorite countries (never been to, probably never will go there) remain Kenya and Ukraine - subjects of reports in 6th grade.

"That is too bad, but maybe the school/district can use this to realize where they need to improve. You might want to speak to the principal regarding it."
I is NOT the fault of the principal or the teachers. As stated in several posts above, it is the No Chid Left Behind law that is ruining good teaching practices. So, contact your wonderful President and legislators. Teachers are very frustrated at being told to "teach to the test" rather than really teaching!