I was speaking to a sales rep from a course provider of one of our online courses yesterday via Zoom. She lives in the Florida Panhandle. She asked if the lightly paved pavement seen through my window was snow, and was surprised to hear how little snow the Vancouver Lower Mainland gets.

Meanwhile I asked her how close to the Florida Keys she was, because I didn’t know that the Panhandle was on the upper coast of the Gulf of Mexico. In my mind the southern tip was the handle and the northern part of Florida was larger than it is, and represented the pan in this visual metaphor.

There are parts of Central and South America that I can easily rattle of the names of countries, and others that would stump me. Likewise for parts of Europe and Africa. But I’ve seen some funny videos of people clueless about basic geography. Like Americans that think Alaska and Hawaii are south of the continental USA because of composite photos like this:

And this Jimmy Kimmel bit interviewing people on the street:

While I think people should know basic geography, and at least be able to know continents and be able to recognize their own country on a map, I do think that we need to be a little understanding when people don’t know many details about other countries, provinces, states, and cities.

I live in Canada, it snows a lot ‘here’, and it’s ok if people don’t know that it doesn’t snow a lot on the southern coast of BC, where the skiing is great on our mountains. It’s ok that I didn’t know where the Florida Panhandle was until now. But I would hope people know that Africa isn’t a country, and know where Asia is, and know that Alaska doesn’t float south of Arizona.

We used to be able to read maps, we had to in order to drive somewhere that we didn’t know. I can remember driving from Toronto to Arizona without a cell phone, and with paper maps to get me there. But now that’s a forgotten experience, and people don’t get as lost anymore. People no longer need to look at a map and not know where they are on it compared to where they are going. Their map location is always pinned. I wonder if this has affected people’s ability to look at maps and recognize countries? Has geographical knowledge been hindered by tools like Google Maps?