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Friday, August 25, 2006

Geographic Spread

How good is our knowledge of geography of the world, or even our own country India?
What do schools do to make this topic interesting ? I remember geography as the most dreaded subject in school & today I simply cannot imagine why as I can see my overall understanding of the cities/ rivers of India and somewhat of the world is not bad. Infact I remember I used to be pretty dumb as I had once marked Allahabad in Maharashtra - supposedly confused it with Ahmedabad- which again is not in Maharashtra at all! Slowly, as I began to regularly travel in trains-back and forth from the hostels, I was able to commit to memory the various stations, rivers etc en-route. Things became much easier for me then.
Can we think of ways to make the subject easy to institutionalise in our mind? Geography is like General Knowledge and it is important that we strenghten this knowledge among the kids of today
A few years ago I had this conversation with a colleague of mine-
Me- Hey MS, why did you send the customer samples to Delhi office? It has to go to a client in Sikkim so you should have sent it to Kolkatta office?
MS- So what, anyway Delhi & Sikkim and Kolkatta & Sikkim are equi-distant, so it doesn't matter which office I send the samples to
Me - ???

9 comments:

The Kid said...

woow! I think you were taken for a ride. I do not see an equilateral triangle with Calcutta, Sikkim and Calcutta!

are you sure?

The Kid said...

btw, do you a have kid? wooww again!

The Kid said...

I meant an isosceles traingle.

Twisted DNA said...

Thanks, because of your post I checked the map of India after a long time! It looks like Culcutta is much closer to Sikkim.

Itchingtowrite said...

hi pratap- yes I have kids- 2 of them. TD, Pratap- yes sikkim is close to Kolkatta... Obviously MS did not know that & hence the goof up.

mommyof2 said...

You should keep a map of India in your office to avoid these goof ups in future. You never know what Ms will do next:-)

Itchingtowrite said...

Ha ha M of 2- nice blog name btw & welcome to my post.. keep coming...
Contrary to what appears to the eye... our MS is a very sweet person I am sure he didn't mean to con me.. just face saving exercise of his.. but yes he agrees that his geography is extremely poor as he has never been out of tamil nadu for more than 2 days at a stretch and therefore cannot appreciate the geographical contours.. I am sure MS will blush a few shades darker if he comes to know that I am taking a trip on him on my blog...

Artnavy said...

I LOVED Georaphy as a kid and all things social for that matter- I still do. You just need to walk around and explore literally to be aware.

Itchingtowrite said...

welcome artnavy! well said on the literally walking around