More Teaching Memories

Remember the days when National Geographic Magazine was not sold on the newsstands?  To subscribe to the magazine you had to become a member of the National Geographic Society, and the only way to become a member was to be nominated by another member.  One of our neighbors subscribed, and as a child I used to look at his magazines.  Even in elementary school I was fascinated with faraway places, and I loved the photographs in his magazines.  The neighbor nominated me for membership in the society, and so, at a young age (I think I was in the second grade) I received a certificate of membership and I started to receive the magazines.  I subscribed throughout my youth and my teaching career.  However, eventually it seemed to me that the quality of the writing had declined, and the articles were more about science than geography.  Sometime in the early 2000s I cancelled my subscription.

One of the things I loved about the magazine (I don't know if it is still true) was that several times a years a map from the National Geographic Cartographic Division was included with the magazine.  

While I was cleaning out my attic, I found a bunch of those maps.  In my early teaching days at the junior high school I taught seventh grade geography as well as ninth grade Spanish.  I put the National Geographic maps to good use.  At the beginning of the school year, when I was teaching the students map-reading skills, they had a classroom project to complete using several dozen of my maps.  Paper-clipped to one was a notecard on which I had written several questions.  The maps were laid out on a counter at the side of my classroom.  The students worked in groups of two, and on paper wrote down their answers to the questions. When they finished one map, they would return it to the counter and pick up another one.  It usually took them two or three days to complete the project.  

This map still had the questions clipped to it.

The questions for this particular map included...

Name three Canadian provinces which have coastlines along the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

What is the most important river on the map?

What is the largest city along that river?

Which area appears to be less densely populated, New Brunswick or Labrador?

It was a very good project, although it was quite time-consuming for me to grade their work.