What being a sixth grader taught me

When I was in 6th grade, I was moved from a very small parochial school to a private school, replete with starched, stiff uniforms and caricatured, humorless teachers, each with multiple credentials, from handfuls of master's degrees to PhDs. I did not belong, at least not any more than I had at the previous school which was not a lot. On my very first day, my social studies teacher gave us a blank map of the world and told us to label as many places as we could in fifteen minutes. This might have been my first experience of a panic attack and testing anxiety. As I began sweating profusely, and with a racing heart and breath which had stopped being whole, I thought, I am so dumb, I don't know any of these places. How can I not know where my home is?

Everyone else seemed to be busily writing in the names of continents- a concept I had not yet learned (again, I attended a small, parochial school before this which, at the time, were not known for their ss curriculum)- countries, states, cities, oceans, and rivers. At the end of the allotted (and painful) fifteen minutes,  I submitted my paper with no more than my first name and the day's date. I thought for sure the teacher would now only ever see me as dumb and not belonging. Just retelling it makes my heart speed up a bit and though I can't prove it, pretty sure she liked me a little less after this. 

As an educator, I can see it may have just been a baseline pre-assessment. Perhaps it was not intended to make me feel the way I did. Perhaps it was information that would help the teacher see where her students were in their understanding of geography (it being more than 30 years ago, pre modern classroom and ballooned support for self-paced learning, perhaps not). But here's the thing, it felt awful. (This little anecdote could serve as a friendly reminder to keep doing as we do now and informing and reassuring our students that much of our assessment is for us, the teacher, to see if we are teaching what we think and hope we are). The personal consequence of this horror-filled, palpitating episode was becoming adept at memorization. Maintaining recall just long enough to get an A on a test or a quiz was my superpower. It didn't help me understand the relationship between location and people or location and culture or location and economics, etc. but, it got me through middle school and high school.

Our school has a world map painted on a wall across from the library. On occasion, you might find a third grade class out there looking at it, discovering a new place and where it is in relation to us. Recently, in honor of Hispanic Heritage month, a teacher even put out a sign asking if students could identify places where Spanish was spoken. While great to see, is it enough? 

Tying geography (and all themes of social studies) to other concepts and to more content areas is necessary if we want our students to be globally literate and astute citizens. As I read over curriculum (for social studies, language, art, science, and even math), the value of connection continues to stand out. When things are isolated, we miss an opportunity to better understand ourselves and others; we fail to comprehend, for example, how the town, city, state, country, and continent in which we find ourselves plays a much bigger role in who and how we are as a person, as a community, and as a people. When we approach learning by cross-curricular means we enable students to perform higher-order and critical thinking. And isn't that the whole point of education?