My husband is pushing the kids to learn U.S. geography by offering them rewards if they can learn to correctly identify all the states on the map. There’s a website that he’s using for this. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s pretty cool. It lets you quiz yourself on all the major areas of the world.
My husband presented me the opportunity to take some quizzes on the website, and I took the ones on the U.S., Europe, Africa, and Asia. I like to think that I did better than the average American would, but I didn’t do as well as I should have. In the U.S., I could identify the states if I started with the ones I knew well and then reasoned out the rest, but I struggled with the direct quiz (e.g., “click on Wyoming”). I was utterly clueless about Eastern Europe. Though I knew Asia fairly well in high school, some big gaps have opened up in my knowledge of that area since. My weakest performance was in Africa. There I knew Egypt, Sudan, Libya, South Africa, and Madagascar, and roughly where Morocco, Algeria, and Liberia were. I couldn’t even make educated guesses at the rest. It’s such a massive continent, and I know so little about it!
I’ve managed to get by thus far without knowing geography well. It was a little galling to be confronted with my ignorance, but probably not enough to spur me to educate myself. Too bad no one’s offering me incentives to improve my geographical knowledge!