World Locations English
Michael Novick
>Continuing the train of "what we call different parts of the world", I
>think it is important to be sensitive to this issue--especially if one
>is going to teach English in another country.
I think it's important even when teaching people from other countries in an
English speaking one. The cultural/political nature of geography and place
names comes up repeatedly in various ways at all levels in my experience.
I have a world map posted in my room, for example; but it's a Peters
Projection "equal areas" map, which shows the actual relative size of the
"north" and "south," as opposed to the vastly over-inflated north and
under-represented south of the more common Mercator projection. In talking
about nationality and "Where are you from?" in beginning levels, we talk
about what countries call themselves versus the names they are given by
other countries and in other languages. My students are always curious
about and critical of the U.S. practice of calling our citizens
"Americans." Mexicans and possibly others in Latin America call us "United
Stateseans" (estadosunidenses). We discuss why certain terms that people
have used are considered offensive today, such as "Chinaman" and
"Oriental." Practicing "How many ... are there?" with 'continents' as the
count-noun, one discovers that people from different countries have
different answers to the question.
In discussing time zones and the concept of the 'eastern' and 'western'
hemisphere, the question of who determines east and west arises: the north
and south poles and the equator are physical (or at least geometric)
realities, the prime (Greenwich) meridian is a construct of the British
navy. It's important to realize the relativity of east, west, etc. even
within a locality (such as, I'll meet you on the northwest corner of
Hollywood and Vine, to name a famous intersection in Los Angeles -- north
and west of the center of the intersection, even if you have to travel
southeast to get there). It is relatively easy to decipher what someone
from the U.S. means by the Northwest or the South when referring to this
country, but what is the "Midwest?" That term is comprehensible only when
you realize that the same area used to be the Northwest or the West, before
U.S. expansionism took additional territory from the British, French,
Spanish, and Russian empires and from Mexico. Then the same land became the
"Middle West."
Michael Novick mno...@lausd.k12.ca.us Los Angeles CA USA
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