re: Have Schools just dropped Geography from the curriculum

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My 16 yr. Old son that learns a lot through scientific and historical documentaries didn't realize that their is a Washington D.C and a state named Washington. He's always busting big facts on me because he's addicted to documentaries, I got to throw that in his face ,

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To be fair, when I was 16 I wrote an essay on WWI Germany and just called them Nazis. My Dad proofread it and called me an idiot.

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My kids in Private Catholic School learned all that stuff.

My son took geography for a semester Freshman Year in HS.

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Standard public curriculum in most states. OP's kid is 11.

I mean you have maps at the click of a button. Imagine thinking this is great information to have in your head

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To be honest my Geography teacher was basically retarded.

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So was mine. She was only there to coach cheerleading. She got tired of me constantly correcting her on shite and one day decided to dig her heals in by insisting Sao Tome and Principe were two different countries. Bad move on her part.

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Sidebar protip if you have kids approaching teens. Start making them recognize places you go regularly(grocery store, grandmaws, etc) and make them try to tell you how to get home without using gps. Then with less familiar places, let them use their phone gps. It's a fun game that also helps them develop navigational skills that many adult women seem to lack

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If I had to run errands with Mom, I used to like to close my eyes and track the route in my head. Then guess where we were when the engine cut off.

Transgender studies is Geography. It's infrastructure too.

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Also, any post-millenial middle schooler whose parents instilled in them even a modicum of interest in learning would have by now googled "what is the capital of my state" just out of curiosity.

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My kid isn't good with history/geography type stuff but he can google like a mad man. Any math put in front of him is not a problem at all though, and he somehow remembers all the details of contracts for athletes across the NFL and NBA, so the file system works up there some how. When we go to basketball games in person he can somehow tally and remember in game stats without the aid of a digital device.

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We’ve got to get coaches out of social studies and civics.

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Well now you’ve got Mom’s Driving Academy. When I was in school all the coaches taught Drivers Ed. And they weren’t worth a shite at that.

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That awesome history teacher I told y’all about, he said for after WWII to throw out the book since save for the Final, the book wouldn’t be used anymore. Instead he passed out the lyrics to “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and then the study guide would go in detail to each phrase what occurred, and that was the last exam before the final.

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Except it's not really responsible to trust pop musicians to teach 20th century world history. Basically, your super cool teacher was either too lazy, ran out of time, or uncomfortable talking about civil rights and Vietnam, so he let Billy Joel teach you post-WWII history.

Unfortunately, that song was written before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and no one has updated it in 30 years. I mean, it's a fun assignment, but only useful if you follow up and break it down. Also fairly useless as de facto history, except as a primary source of the prevailing pop social sentiment at the height of the Cold War.

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ran out of time

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That’s what it was really. Didn’t wrap up WWII until the beginning of May. But yeah, it was fun and I can still recite the song word for word thanks to him.