You're Not on the Map

This week, Yale's National Institute for Teachers begins with a refresher course in dormitories.

I forgot the standard protocol of bringing bedspread and sheets and spent the first night on a plastic mattress with two paper thin sheets and a flimsy blanket as my covering. My roommate, Ane, from Houston and I agreed to support eachother from the start. We discovered the dining room, regulated the thermostat and purloined a stack of bowls and silverware for our efficiency suite and mini kitchen.

We are part of Yale's Initiative to inspire, motivate and empower about 60 teachers from 10 states across the country. Each of us comes from a struggling school district, with disadvantaged students and iffy classrooms. Ane teaches English and Art and is doing a project on the new production of The Color Purple on Broadway starring Fantasia in her course called"Adapting Literature."

With the Yale Seminar, I will introduce my 100 students at Capital High School in Santa Fe to "Maps and Mapmaking," with a particular link to The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs, and a look at relations between poverty in Santa Fe, the US, Africa and the world. Our particular focus is MAPS--what is on a map, directions, measurements and locations, symbols and what is not--specifics and alot of details about real people.

Our teacher, Professor Mary Miller (center in black shirt and me far left) is the Vincent J. Scully Professor of the History of Art. She starts with the basics of time and space . Her thesis has been that every map has a "point of view"--what are we being influenced to see? We learn about early maps, Mercator, and longitude and latitude, Ptolemy's sense of the Earth and flat maps which distort shape. Yesterday we learned to 'stride' --that is measure in paces using our average walking step. We measured the commons in one of the Yale houses. Today we used compasses to measure building angles and then plotted our dormitory.

We read Dava Sobel's Longitude and how the concept of longitude was developed using every possible and imaginable system. We soon will be studying How to Lie with Maps by Monmonier. His survey of all kind of maps begins with distortions in measurement. Tourist maps which try to get us to see things so "we buy." He covers in depth maps which aggregate data. These are the treasure trove of ideas that I want to explore? How does the US Census data average counties and cities. How does it misrepresent poverty by using only income data--leaving out the disastrous consequences of poor health and social decay? What is missing in maps from the data which is averaged to represent the income of Santa Fe that includes the enormously wealthy but averages them in with the poorest of the poor students whom I teach?

Being at Yale at this time during the filming of the Indiana Jones sequel has been incredible. Stephen Spielberg has redone the entire campus in the 50's US style. Street lights and signs removed, building facades refabricated, shops filled with antiquated clothing and products. One has a sense of the passage of time and lost maps and adventures. I hope my students will latch onto my enthusiasm and excitement for maps. From early childhood, I loved to examine, study and collect maps of adventures and far off lands.

The group from Santa Fe, pictured above is composed of teachers in elementary to high school. Each of us is dedicated to working to enliven our classroom curriculum with content we learn in our Yale Seminars. Teachers from the College of Santa Fe, also are participating to help us create an organization to sustain the work locally and launch our own seminars a la Yale.

All is not work, however, there is a terrific heat wave, and it is humid too!. Under the trees it was nice and relaxing.