Geography Teacher Quotes

If only at school, geography teachers, surely the most scoffed and pilloried class of pedagogue there is, if only they had concentrated less on rift valleys, trig points and the major exports of Indonesia and more on the fact that geography could promise a classy royal society with the sexiest lecture theatre in the land.

After Col. Henry Bouquet defeated the Ohio Indians at Bushy Run in 1763, he demanded the release of all white captives. Most of them, especially the children, had to be “bound hand and foot” and forcibly returned to white society. Meanwhile, the Native prisoners “went back to their defeated relations with great signs of joy,” in the words of the anthropologist Frederick Turner (in Beyond Geography, 245). Turner rightly calls these scenes “infamous and embarrassing.

You know what makes you a real Mississippian?" I rant or maybe just scream inwardly while flipping off the Confederate statue trapped in my rearview. "Surviving a Mississippi public education, that's what makes you a goddamn Mississippian. ... If you don't have giant gaps in geography -- entire countries you're unaware of, major religions you don't know exist -- then nope, not a Mississippian. If you had sober teachers who could even spell matriculate then you're from someplace fancy like Alabama.

Bradley Headstone, in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its decent hair-guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man of six-and-twenty. He was never seen in any other dress, and yet there was a certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there were a want of adaptation between him and it, recalling some mechanics in their holiday clothes. He had acquired mechanically a great store of teacher's knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically, sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments mechanically, even play the great church organ mechanically. From his early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage. The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the demands of retail dealers history here, geography there, astronomy to the right, political economy to the left—natural history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics, and what not, all in their several places—this care had imparted to his countenance a look of care; while the habit of questioning and being questioned had given him a suspicious manner, or a manner that would be better described as one of lying in wait. There was a kind of settled trouble in the face. It was the face belonging to a naturally slow or inattentive intellect that had toiled hard to get what it had won, and that had to hold it now that it was gotten. He always seemed to be uneasy lest anything should be missing from his mental warehouse, and taking stock to assure himself.

If you didn’t find some way of stopping it, people would go on asking questions. The teachers were useful there. Bands of them wandered through the mountains, along with the tinkers, portable blacksmiths, miracle medicine men, cloth peddlers, fortune-tellers, and all the other travelers who sold things the people didn’t need every day but occasionally found useful. They went from village to village delivering short lessons on many subjects. They kept apart from the other travelers and were quite mysterious in their ragged robes and strange square hats. They used long words, like corrugated iron. They lived rough lives, surviving on what food they could earn from giving lessons to anyone who would listen. When no one would listen, they lived on baked hedgehog. They went to sleep under the stars, which the math teachers would count, the astronomy teachers would measure, and the literature teachers would name. The geography teachers got lost in the woodsand fell into bear traps. People were usually quite pleased to see them. They taught children enough to shut them up, which was the main thing, after all. But they always had to be driven out of the villages by nightfall in case they stole chickens.

I was perplexed by the failure of teachers at school to address what seemed the most urgent matter of all: the bewildering, stomach-churning insecurity of being alive. The standard subjects of history, geography, mathematics, and English seemed perversely designed to ignore the questions that really mattered. As soon as I had some inkling of what 'philosophy' meant, I was puzzled as to why we were not taught it. And my skepticism about religion only grew as I failed to see what the vicars and priests I encountered gained from their faith. They struck me either as insincere, pious, and aloof or just bumblingly good-natured. (p. 10)

I fell in love with my country because of the stories my grandfather told me and because of our travels together through the south. He taught me history and geography, showed me maps, made me read Chilean writers, corrected my grammar and handwriting. As a teacher, he was short on patience but long on severity; my errors made him red with anger, but if he was content with my work he would reward me with a wedge of Camembert cheese,

You know, you sound a very educated man for a barbarian,” said Rincewind. “Oh, dear me, I didn’t start out a barbarian. I used to be a school teacher. That’s why they call me Teach.” “What did you teach?” “Geography. And I was very interested in Auriental* studies. But I decided to give it up and make a living by the sword.” “After being a teacher all your life?” “It did mean a change of perspective, yes.” “But … well … surely … the privation, the terrible hazards, the daily risk of death…” Mr. Saveloy brightened up. “Oh, you’ve been a teacher, have you?

WHEN ASKED “ What do we need to learn this for?” any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness. Because it’s true. Latin, geography, the gods of ancient Greece and Rome: unless you know these things, you’ll be limited to doing the puzzles in People magazine, where the clues read “Movie title, Gone ____ the Wind” and “It holds up your pants.” It’s not such a terrible place to start, but the joy of accomplishment wears off fairly quickly.

It is a truism today, in this highly technologically-developed culture, that students need technical computer skills. Equally truistic (and, not incidentally, true) is that the workplace has become highly technological. Even more truistic – and far more disturbing – are the shifts in education over the last two decades as public elementary schools, public and private high schools, and colleges and universities have invested scores of billions of dollars on “digital infrastructure,” computers, monitors and printers, “smart classrooms,” all to “meet the demands” of this new technological workplace. "We won’t dwell on the fact – an inconvenient truth? – that those technological investments have coincided with a decline in American reading behaviors, in reading and reading comprehension scores, in overall academic achievement, in the phenomenon – all too familiar to us in academia – of “grade inflation,” in an alarming collapse of our students’ understanding of their own history (to say nothing of the history of the rest of the world), rising ignorance of world and American geography, with an abandonment of the idea of objectivity, and with an increasingly subjective, even solipsistic, emphasis on personal experience. Ignore all this. Or, if we find it impossible to ignore, then let’s blame the teachers...

Geography lessons go virtual: Danish government creates Minecraft version of ENTIRE country to help teachers Geography lessons go virtual: Danish government creates Minecraft version of ENTIRE country to help teachers Entire country was recreated by government's mapping department Minecraft lesson plans for teachers also created in bid to make education more accessible By Mark Prigg Published: 22:06 GMT, 25 April 2014 | Updated: 23:01 GMT, 25 April 2014 The Danish government has recreated the entire country in the hit computer game Minecraft. The first country to be fully transplanted into the blocky Minecraft games, the government hopes it could help make lessons more fun for students. It has even produced a series of lesson plans for teachers to help them navigate the virtual version of their country. Scroll down for video Denmark's Ministry of the Environment has created a full-scale model of the country in Minecraft for players to explore. The downloadable model consists of 4,000 billion blocks and requires one terabyte of storage space.

The little boy met with his teachers and studied history, geography, mathematics, music, strategy, politics, dance, falconry, and all the things an emperor has to know so that later on he can do everything that makes him feel that doing it makes him the emperor.

Another common adult misunderstanding is this: Parents and teachers think that the child should be taught the local geography first. From there they introduce her to ever larger units by graduated steps. The child is not, however, naturally disposed to learn by graduated steps. Her mind tends to leap from one spatial-temporal scale to another, such that, at seven or eight, she may well take a more lively interest in America than in Dane County, Wisconsin, in the dinosaur than in the dairy cow, in the Great Wall of China than in her hometown’s water tower. Socially and morally, too, she is more drawn to issues of good and evil, fairness and unfairness, categories that affect her life, than to adult priorities of class, ethnicity, and nationality.14 Unfortunately, adults have power, which they all too often use to steer the child to their own narrower concerns.

Class size has become something of a fetish, and the overall pupil/teacher ratio has declined at a slow rate since the 1970s. It’s now—with enormous variation between grades, schools, and geographies—about 20:1.27 However, it’s not clear how important this metric is.

Strabo was an Asiatic Greek of Amasia in Pontus and an educated citizen of the Roman empire, who visited Rome in 44 BC at age 19 or 20, apparently for purposes of education. He studied under various teachers, including Tyrannion, a captive educated Greek and private tutor, who also instructed Cicero’s two sons. Strabo’s sole surviving work is Γεωγραφικά (Geography), an encyclopaedia of geographical knowledge, consisting of seventeen books written in Greek.

GEOGRAPHY TEACHER: What state would you find Lincoln in? STUDENT: A state of extreme boredom, if he was in this class.

God does not come to us beyond the flesh but in the flesh, at the hands of a teacher who will not be spiritualized but who goes on trust­ing the embodied sacraments of bread, wine, water, and feet. “Do this,” he said—not believe this but do this—”in remem­brance of me.

Every few years, a teacher from Monroe Colored High loaded a band of students onto the flat bed of a pickup truck and rattled across the Missouri Pacific Railway tracks. They passed the rich people’s porticos and pulled up to the back entrance of the white high school in town. The boys jumped out and began stacking the truck bed with the books the white school was throwing away. That is how Monroe Colored High School got its books. The boys loaded the truck with old geography and English texts, some without covers and with pages torn out and love notes scrawled in the margins, and headed back to their side of town. By the time he was old enough to understand where the books came from, Pershing was fast putting together the pieces of the world he lived in. He knew there was a dividing line, but it was hitting him in the face now. He was showing a talent for science and was getting to the point that he needed reference books to do his lesson. But it was against the law for colored people to go to the public library. “And the library at the Colored High School did not live up to its name,” he said years later. He was in the eighth grade when word filtered to his side of the tracks that Monroe was getting a new high school. It wouldn’t replace the old building that Monroe Colored High was in. It was for the white students, who already had a big school. It would be called Neville High. The colored people could see it going up when they ventured to the other side of the tracks. It rose up like a castle, four stories of brick and concrete with separate wings and a central tower, looking as if it belonged at Princeton or Yale. It opened in 1931 on twenty-two acres of land. The city fathers made a fuss over the state-of-the-art laboratories for physics and chemistry, the 2,200-seat balconied auditorium, the expanded library, and the fact it was costing $664,000 to build. As the new high school took shape across town, Pershing watched his father rise in the black of morning to milk the cows and walk the mile and a half to open his building the size of a grade school. His father, his mother, and the other teachers at Monroe Colored High School were working long hours with hand-me-down supplies for a fraction of the pay their white counterparts were getting. In Louisiana in the 1930s, white teachers and principals were making an average salary of $1,165 a year. Colored teachers and principals were making $499 a year, forty-three percent of what the white ones were.

Mrs. Henderson, Riley’s fifth-grade teacher, surveyed her class appraisingly. “Capital city of Brazil? Johnny?” “Rio de Janeiro,” Johnny answered quickly. Riley nearly shook her head, but stopped at the last minute. It was an easy mistake to have made, and nobody liked a smarty-pants. “No,” Mrs. Henderson replied. “Anybody else?” The class was silent. Riley wondered if any of the other students could name another city in Brazil. “How about you, Riley?” Riley sighed quietly. She briefly considered pretending she didn’t know the answer, but her mother had told her more than once that pretending to be something that you weren’t was the same as lying, and it was a terrible kind of lying, because it was lying to yourself. “Brasilia,” Riley answered. “That’s right,” Mrs. Henderson smiled. “I’m glad someone in this class has been paying attention.” Riley hadn’t been paying attention. She hadn’t even realized the lesson had moved from the geography of Europe to that of South America. She’d read about Brazil in a travel magazine her parents subscribed to. She toyed with her pen as Mrs. Henderson moved on to another South American country. She wanted to start writing, and to do it the way her great-grandfather had. She could put a story down in her notebook. If it was long enough, she might even fill two of them. Maybe someday she would even be published. The thought of seeing her own book on the shelf in a bookstore was just about the best thing she could think of.

A day trip to a local farm ended in disaster when the geography teacher was herded into a sheep dip and all his hair was sheared off. It was slightly preferable to the previous year when the pupils had attached him to the milking machine.

Wheatley Porterman's gift was for identifying social problems, which he set in verse that touched the public's imagination, in the cause of Boy Blue, the scandal of child labour in rural areas which drove underage shepherds to exhaustion. With Georgie Porgie, it was sexual harassment in the playground, by teachers against schoolgirls, Porgie being an overweight geography teacher whose notorious behaviour had previously gone unreported, due to his connection in high places. [...] Wheatley asserted that [The Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe] was allegorical: a cipher, or symbol, for the hideous overcrowding in certain inner city areas.