Hello everyone,

but most of all:

hello dear friends from America,

in times of schools closed due to Corona, like many other people, I have to home-school my children. Everyone who has ever tried to help his children with their homework knows how often one reaches one's own limits.

Today I stumbled over such a limit once again. I was really surprised that my children asked me the same question that I had once asked great American friends years ago, because the fact itself seemed surprising to me when I looked at an American map, as I had done so many times before. Well, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Unfortunately, I do not know today which certainly clever answer my dear friends elmer and Samuel_Ivan gave me at that time.

Therefore, I have no other choice but to ask you this question again today. I hope to keep this time the answer and to be able to give at the same time also with your all help to my children an intelligent answer to their question.

My two older daughters J. and L., who are in the same class, are currently studying North America in geography, or more precisely, the USA. Their teacher now sent the students via mail to the parents a worksheet, a so-called dumb map.

Do you know such dumb maps? All that is marked on these maps are the borders of a country, in this case it was a map of the USA with all the borders of the individual states marked. Well, the map was not completely silent, there were still dots for the capital of each state entered as well as the 10 (economically) most important and longest rivers of the USA or large lakes, plus 2 deserts (Great Salt Lake Desert and Sonoran Desert) and two mountain ranges (Appalachian Mountains and Rocky Mountains). So far, so good.

My children's task now was to give each state its name with its full name as well as the abbreviation of the respective state, and to label the rivers, lakes, deserts and mountain ranges with their names. In addition, all the names of the capitals had to be written at the correct point. Bonus points could be given to the children if they write the correct name of other cities at other dots in different states. This was because in addition to the state capitals, other points were also entered in some states; in California, for example, these were Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego.

Since this map was also intended to be used in history classes, a separate text to the map was to name presidents who came from the corresponding state, the date of accession to the U.S., and other points that are not important here.

So far, so good, still. The really surprising thing was the question my kids asked, as mentioned above the almost same question I asked a very good American friend years ago. Can you help me answer it????



It's a good question, isn't it? Please don't leave me hanging now, there's no need to rush now, I'd rather wait a bit, but then I can give my kids a really intelligent and correct answer to their question.

And so that you also have your fun, here is another task of the children. Which of the lengths listed goes with which American river???

• 4130 km
  
• 3778 km
  
• 3120 km
  
• 3034 km
  
• 2364 km
  
• 2333 km
  
• 2102 km
  
• 2075 km
  
• 1953 km
  
• 1674 km
  
  
• Yukon River
  
• Red River
  
• Arkansas River
  
• Columbia River
  
• Snake River
  
• Mississippi
  
• Colorado River
  
• Ohio River
  
• Rio Grande
  
• Missouri

You can keep the answers to yourselves. I had fun matching the rivers to the correct length. But don't cheat, google or wiki is a no-no!!!

I thank you now for helpful answers to the important question,

everyone stay healthy, take care of yourselves and your fellow man,

divi

Hi Sin_Sizzle,

that was a profound and very convincing answer for which I am very grateful. The answer makes sense, sounds very logical and therefore credible, if I think about it correctly, I think: "Yes, I think so in the kind it was also explained to me at the time", but I had not remembered the answer at the time.
Once again my heartfelt thanks for that.

What astonishes me, however, is your statement concerning the teaching of geography and other subjects in the USA. I would not have thought that Berlin can actually overtake other countries with its education system. You must know that education policy in Germany is under the sovereignty of the federal states. In competition with other states, Berlin is doing very poorly, there are worlds between the quality of teaching between, for example, Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg and Berlin.

Everyone stay healthy, take care of yourselves and your fellow man,

divi

Starting during the Reagan era, The GOP and later joined by some Democrats(read Bill Clinton) got heavily into the idea
of having performance measuring on schools by forcing every student and every grade to take a yearly exam run by the
various states education departments, but meeting criteria set by the US Dept of Education. From the results, teachers
were judged on the basis of how each class students performed on the tested subject/ and funding either made or denied to these public schools.

The trouble is the political decision was made to only focus the testing only on Math, English, and Science as so-called "practical"
subjects. Subjects like Art, Music, Drama, History, Civics were not examined, and since at the same time GOP
tea party type politicians took power in many states and cut school budgets, budgets only went to subjects that were being tested.
Many schools completely lost their music and art programs. History and Civics subjects suffered and were not tested because
of the political disagreement of "whose" version history or civics should be taught, so without a common consensus on
the "correct" answers to history and civics test items, no testing was performed, and history and civics classed were
defunded and sometimes dropped completely.(that is the answer why so many younger Americans have NO understanding
of their country's or world history, and NO understanding of how the political decision are made. This was
the result of conscious political decisions to cut school budgets and refrain from teaching subjects.) Never fear
though, American High School Football programs were always well funded and staffed (given that they provide local bread and circus
fun for many American communities). Also, science suffered in many states, when evangelical politicians demanded that
"creationism"( the biblical version of how Man and the World came about( God created everything in 7 days, no evolution, man
and dinosaur lived together).. either be treated on the same standing as modern science i.e evolution, the big bang creation'
of the universe etc) or be replaced completely by creationism and interfered with the selection of textbooks and denying funding to schools that taught real science.

I understand your pain on the quality of Berlin schools. My state Arizona went from being in the top 10 of American States
for school quality and funding under 30 years of GOP tea party state government funding cuts to NOW ranking 49th. (Only Mississippi is worse).

It's not a good story or one this country should be proud of
but that is the story of why we got an abundance of ignorant idiots running around(doing things like storming congress,
believing in cults etc), why so many Americans couldn't point out New York City or Los Angeles on the map,
oh hell ... many of them couldn't find their own city or county on a map of their own state. It is all the pretty much
the expected result of 40 or so years of conscious political decisions on some politician's part.

SinSizzle

Divi,
I completely agree with your statement that is a parent's responsibility to educate and make up for the lapses of state-provided education.
I worry about the effect of shoddy or indifferent attention that some parents are providing the current generation of students
in the current pandemic during the homeschooling lockdowns.

As to language lol, there is an old joke in the US... "What is another name for somebody who mono-lingual? ....American"

Starting in the 19th Century, the government forced assimilation of non-English speaking immigrants by discouraging and banning teaching in any language other than English. The hostility to foreign language instruction extended not just from banning the use of native-language instruction but to fairly active discouragement of even teaching second language instruction. That practice largely continues today
with rather unfunded and rather shoddy teaching of foreign languages in American schools. For example, myself technically
had about 7 years of Spanish(common in the western states). starting in the 7th grade, and going into college. I can
barely read the language, can not understand spoken Spanish, and due to my Northern Rocky Mountain accent, I acquired growing up
have the most atrocious form of a North American Spanish accent. (My regional accent is almost unnoticeable in English, but
in Spanish due to the accent's dropping of last syllables, it almost completely mangles Spanish losing all verb tense
conjugation and word gender). American Foreign language schooling is generally atrocious, and we pay the price
in that foreign business negotiations almost completely rely on the foreigners speaking English, because nobody
on the American Negotiating team can adequately speak the other language. I am actually more comfortable in Japanese
that I learned with about 1 year of schooling to work in Japan, than Spanish which I had 7 years of.

Mostly French(mostly in Eastern states) and Spanish(Western and Florida0 and Latin are taught. some German is taught
mostly in Midwest, where there was substantial German immigration in 19th Century...

You mentioned Russian, as a child of the cold war, there was a brief period during my last 2 years of high school, where
the government briefly encouraged Russian language study. Done for the purpose of developing translators to better understand and crush
the hated "Enemy". My school introduced the course, and I thought about taking it, because Spanish class was so bad, and getting
fluent in Russian would probably have made getting a career in Military Intelligence or the CIA a given. With the collapse
of the wall and the end of the cold war, that brief experiment in Russian Language instruction in the US quickly died out,
since we were no longer planning the demise of the soviet state and Russian people.

SinSizzle