Were you a good geography student in school?

[golden eagle]

Since we're all map geeks, in addition to our obvious road-geekdom, how good (or bad) of a geography student were you in school? I excelled in it.

[corco]

Very good- in fact I'm one semester off from having a bachelor's degree in it  

I came in 6th in the regional college geography bowl this year- if I would have come in 5th I would have got to go to nationals. I was hungover, but my goal next year is to be on top of my game and dominate

[agentsteel53]

I came in 6th in the regional college geography bowl this year- if I would have come in 5th I would have got to go to nationals. I was hungover, but my goal next year is to be on top of my game and dominate

sounds like me with the spelling bee in the 7th grade.  (Except for the hangover part!)

as for geography, I was all right at it, and generally still am, though my US geography is significantly stronger than my world geography.  Today, a cow orker had a tough time explaining to me where his hometown in China is.

[corco]

It was embarrassing- I ended up in a tiebreaker contest for 5th place with a girl from Air Force Academy and the question was "What state did the movie Brokeback Mountain take place in"- which admittedly isn't much of a geography question (the tiebreaker questions were stretches), but i really should have known the answer given that I live in Wyoming. I guessed California and lost.  

[huskeroadgeek]

I've been very good at US geography since I was little. In college, people used to like to play games with me where they would tell me their hometown, and usually I could tell them what county they lived in and some of the major highways that went through their town. I've had a good general knowledge of world geography since I was little too-where countries and major physical features were at. Recently, I've been trying to learn more specific geography about other areas-particularly Australia and Europe(and more specifically the UK). Having Google Street View in these areas prompted me to want to learn a lot more about them and their highway systems.

[agentsteel53]

what a harebrained question!  That's like asking what state Paris Hilton was born in.

[Chris]

I guess you can call me a geography-geek. In the Netherlands, you'll get graded on a scale from 1 to 10, and I always got 10's without even learning in elementary school. There was some geography in the first year of high school, and again I got a 10. The next highest grade was a 4... I felt like a nerd back then, because getting a 10 on something geeky like that wasn't seen as "cool" if you're in high school.

[agentsteel53]

getting a 10 on something geeky like that wasn't seen as "cool" if you're in high school.

to this day I wonder where evolution went wrong - where those that excel were seen to be inferior in terms of "cool".  Ladies and gents, it is your species at stake... where did you get the instinct to screw this up?  Especially during your prime reproductive years!

[J N Winkler]

It was embarrassing- I ended up in a tiebreaker contest for 5th place with a girl from Air Force Academy and the question was "What state did the movie Brokeback Mountain take place in"- which admittedly isn't much of a geography question (the tiebreaker questions were stretches), but I really should have known the answer given that I live in Wyoming. I guessed California and lost.

You could have guessed "Texas" with a claim on correctness, though most of the action takes place in Wyoming.  The movie was actually filmed in Alberta, as you can tell right away from the white-painted signposts and the odd-looking curve signs.

Since we're all map geeks, in addition to our obvious road-geekdom, how good (or bad) of a geography student were you in school? I excelled in it.

I never took it.  For that matter, I am now finishing up a history doctorate and I never took any history in high school after AP US History, or as an undergraduate at all.

The trouble with fact-heavy fields like geography and history is that the trivia allows teachers to cover up their inability or unwillingness to discuss the fundamental relationships.  If you are a math professor, people know straight away when you are not talking about rings, fields, countability, eigenvalues etc.  In geography you can hide behind the 50 state capitals, the 105 Kansas counties, the chefs-lieux of the 96 metropolitan French départements, and on and on ad nauseam if you don't want to get into von Thünen's Isolierte Staat.  But in order to make any progress in these fields as an academic, or indeed to deepen our collective understanding of the organizing principles of human production and consumption, it is necessary to think interpretatively and synthetically, and to interrogate the relationships among disparate facts.

I basically started out as a road enthusiast when I first got my driver's license.  I was even an avid collector of maps for about seven years.  Lately, however, I have realized that it is harder and harder for me to get excited about maps by themselves, as opposed to a tool for spatial understanding of the history, economics, and physical characteristics of a region.  It is usually something else--a movie I see, a novel I read, a set of construction plans that falls into my hands--that sparks my interest.

Last summer I discovered it was possible to obtain construction plans for French highways online, so I decided I wanted to know more about provincial France.  I sat down with a road atlas for France and read it over a number of days.  It had about seventy pages and I would sit down for about an hour each time and read five pages.  Later, as part of an attempt to better organize my understanding of French geography, I sat down with smaller maps of the autoroute and reseau vert networks, and tried to understand how they operated as complete networks.

A number of the construction plans I had downloaded last summer related to separate lengths of the N21, which runs roughly from Limoges in central France to south of Lourdes in the Pyrenees.  The time I spent with the French road atlas allowed me to understand how these projects fit into a wider program to improve the N21 to voie express standard.  One of the projects I downloaded had more than 200 sign design sheets for dualling of the N21 (which is currently a grade-separated two-lane road similar to a Kansas Super Two) between Tarbes and Lourdes, while another related to a series of town bypasses near St. Antoine de Ficalba.

Last summer I also read Olivia Manning's Balkans trilogy (The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, and Friends and Heroes), which follows a couple (the husband works for the British Council teaching English) as they live and work in Bucharest and then Athens in the early days of World War II.  I had to do a fair bit of reading in historical geography to understand the context of the Hungarians' and Romanians' fears of what the Russians and Germans might do in the winter and spring of 1939-40.  I also pulled out an all-Europe road atlas so I could find the Iron Gate (Portile de Fier in Romanian) and trace the Danube from the Black Sea to its headwaters.  Because Google Maps at that time had absolutely no street-level mapping in Romania (hard to believe, but true--it has since been added), I actually had to Google for other mapping services which would allow me to locate the Calea Victoriei, the old royal palace, and other prominent landmarks mentioned in the first novel.  I learned about Ada Kaleh too, though by the time in which the novels were set, it had been part of Romania for almost 20 years and was no longer a Turkish smuggler's port.

And, of course, my sign design sheet collection is in a sense a long-term geography project, though properly speaking it falls under cultural geography (inscription of placenames) as opposed to, say, location theory (which is what Isolierte Staat is all about) or historical geography (though there is a historical element for the states where I have been able to get multiple generations of signing plans for the same length of road).

[Dougtone]

getting a 10 on something geeky like that wasn't seen as "cool" if you're in high school.

to this day I wonder where evolution went wrong - where those that excel were seen to be inferior in terms of "cool".  Ladies and gents, it is your species at stake... where did you get the instinct to screw this up?  Especially during your prime reproductive years!

This makes me think of the movie Idiocracy.

[agentsteel53]

a lot of things remind me of "Idiocracy".  Whether that implies a great movie, or an absurdly shitty society, I will leave as a decision to the reader...

[agentsteel53]

I never took it.  For that matter, I am now finishing up a history doctorate and I never took any history in high school after AP US History, or as an undergraduate at all.

I took two history classes in college as part of the humanities requirement (early US history, focusing on European colonization, viking times to 1776; and world history 1900-1945 or so), and otherwise my history knowledge is either from high school (shudder*) or just picked up independently.  

* I remember taking what passed for "AP US History" and being strongly advised not to take the AP exam - I was the first student in 10 years to get a "5".  Shows the state of public education!

[corco]

I basically started out as a road enthusiast when I first got my driver's license.  I was even an avid collector of maps for about seven years.  Lately, however, I have realized that it is harder and harder for me to get excited about maps by themselves, as opposed to a tool for spatial understanding of the history, economics, and physical characteristics of a region.  It is usually something else--a movie I see, a novel I read, a set of construction plans that falls into my hands--that sparks my interest.

This absolutely starts to be the case after a while. For those of you on this forum who haven't gone to college yet or are early in your college career, I highly, highly recommend taking a couple upper-division cultural geography courses regardless of your major. I'm more concentrated on the GIS side of geography because when it comes time to find a job, GIS is much more useful than cultural geography (although now that I'm looking to go onto post-graduate work I'm seeing that the mix of the two is very beneficial), but the courses are some of the most interesting you'll take in college and it really does change ones mindset on how they look at the world around them.

For instance, in a class I just finished taking our final assignment was to divide Laramie into several culture regions based on whatever parameters (as long as they were justifiable). When I first got the assignment my thought was "What," because I've lived here for a year and a half now and haven't really noticed any distinct cultural regions, so I spent a whole day driving around Laramie with my cultural geography goggles on and realized "Wow, there's a lot of Laramie I've just mentally ignored- even stuff I drive by every day" and the paper ended up being quite easy to write.

At the collegiate level the trivia becomes trivial. I'd guess most of my professors couldn't name all the counties in Nebraska- they seem smart because they think spatially, as I imagine most of us who read this forum do, so they can pick that stuff up really easily, but that's not a priority at all. If I were to have won the national Geography Bowl, it might be something I'd put on my resumé and it's something that may with all else equal push me over the edge, but that in itself isn't going to get me into a Master's program or even be a strong factor in consideration. I'd expect an interviewer to ask "So what else did you get out of that conference besides the bowl" and expect me to know and express interest some of the research presented at the conference and put more weight on that then the fact that I know Vancouver is the largest city in Canada west of Ontario.

And honestly, while having giant lists of stuff in one's head makes for a great parlor trick (can also be devastating- meet a girl in a bar in Wyoming, ask where she's from, have her say Anatone, WA, and then say "Oh I know exactly where that is" and then you're done because the only way you (in the middle of Wyoming) know exactly where that is is if you're a geography nerd), it's less interesting then thinking about things spatially and just noticing subtle differences from place to place.

There was a BBC segment on modern cartography a couple months ago- I think it was even linked to on this forum, and one of the primary points made was that with GPS and even road maps, we've become so route oriented that we completely lose track of what we drive through and don't take time to appreciate the cultural nuances of new places. I suppose this is why I'm so averse to interstate travel- driving down the freeway your entire exposure to culture is that the Flying J in Laramie has fewer African-Americans in it then the one in Texas, but otherwise there's no difference between being in two very, very different areas. That saddens me.

[agentsteel53]

I'd guess most of my professors couldn't name all the counties in Nebraska

I would hope not.  The internet is quickly replacing rote memorization and hopefully the school system is picking up on that fact.  I was forced to memorize the state capitals in 1987 or so; nowadays I can name maybe 35-40 off the top of my head, and I would not bet my life on it, preferring instead to look it up in 10 seconds.  (To this day, I see no empirical difference between Montpelier and Burlington - other than that one is a capital and the other one is not - and can barely remember Harrisburg because it is unintuitive, and Honolulu because it is obvious.)

(Similarly, for my work, I remember the syntax of the programming languages I write in, but hardly any of the function calls ... "gee, what's that function that searches for a substring, starting from the *end* of the string?" is easily answered by a visit to php.net or whatnot.)

[yanksfan6129]

I won my school geography bee, and came in 8th place in the state of NJ.

[brianreynolds]

Yeah, I did OK.  In college, I took one class called "Map Reading" and another called "Geography of Michigan" either one of which I could have written the text for and taught.

[Roadgeek Adam]

Very much so. I also have teachers calling for directions, despite being in college

[Bryant5493]

Yeah, learned all of my geography from Animaniacs (lol). Seriously, though, I was pretty good with geography in school.


Be well,

Bryant

[74/171FAN]

I was great with geography in school except for the fact that in World History I spelt Mediterranean wrong a couple times.

[BigMattFromTexas]

I'm definitely better at geography than social studies, I've made as bad as a 2 in social studies, but that was due to me failing to turn in work, after I turned in my 100+ questions I had to answer, I made a 85 or something. Anyways back on topic, I'm pretty good at geography (better than 75% of my grade).
BigMatt

[Ian]

I'm fairly good at geography, it's always been my strong subject, despite me only being in the Geo Bee once. In 4th grade, I was always the one to answer all the state capital questions right.

[Mr. Matté]

Yes on the original question.

Last semester, I took a class on New Jersey geography, and the professor gave a little quiz on naming all the states and the 21 counties in the state. I was one of only about 15-20 in the class to get all the states and one of six to get all the counties. The class had about 70 people.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

I got papers from Ohio and Louisiana that say that I'm good in geography.

[Duke87]

"Geography" was never really a subject in its own right for me in school. Only ever came up as it related to other things.

Although, you know... there must have been lessons on reading maps in there somewhere. I just don't remember them because I would have said "pff.. I already know how to do this!" and ceased paying attention.


I do, however, remember that in my Surveying class in college, when we were talking about topographic maps, my professor actually asked me for help a couple times because I knew more about the subject than he did!

[WillWeaverRVA]

I did well in my middle school's geography bee every year we had one, which basically amounted to two years. Geography stopped being significant in grade school after that, but I took it as an elective in college (I was a biology major) and pretty much destroyed it. Easiest A ever.