We moved a number of obstacles just shy of heaven and earth to enable prolonged summer travel with our kids at these particular ages, which made COVID’s disruption of our summer plans all the more frustrating. We’d hoped to pass our love of independent travel onto our kids.
How, then, have we channeled our wanderlust at a time when we can barely leave the house for fear of illness? Geography!
But Don’t We Have Google Maps Now?
I’m a big fan of developing spatial relationship skills. The ability to mentally envision a figure and rotate it in 3 dimensional space strengthens navigation, puzzle solving, and translates well into high level careers like engineering and understanding how proteins fold at the level of cellular interactions.
The reason the coronavirus family has been given that particular name is because some brilliant thinkers in advanced labs figured out that the surface proteins on the outer capsule of the viral particle has spikes resembling a crown – corona means crown in Spanish – so it’s a clear example of how spatial skills have helped us understand the composition of a deadly threat.
Similarly skilled experts across the globe are trying to understand how those external proteins might be the key to a vaccine or successful treatments for infection. Spatial skills matter, and the pandemic only underscores their value.
Geography on the surface is the study of what fits where on a map. At a deeper level, it’s a nuanced introduction to how spatial relationships impact military, civil, economic, culinary and public health relationships (to name just a few).
There’s no app that substitutes for that level of understanding.
Geography Is Less Esoteric Than You Think
A couple of months ago, we began weekly geography lessons starting with the nations sharing a border with China. We began here because it was removed from our daily experience, and because it was the furthest thing we could think of from our children’s daily life.
That sense of remove quickly vanished when headlines around the world highlighted military skirmishes on a remote border of China and India, in the furthest reaches of the Himalayas. Why does control of a remote outpost matter?
Could it possibly be tied to a recent political alliance between China and Pakistan, based on their longstanding distrust of India? Suddenly a body of knowledge tainted with a whiff of the quaintly irrelevant has profound geopolitical implications.
What about the recent normalization of relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel? Understanding the geography of the middle east, and specifically of the UAE’s contentious political relationship with Iran, the 800 pound gorilla neighbor across the Persian gulf, and it begins to explain the delicate dance that was required to have a longstanding critic of Israel develop an unexpected political alliance. Understand the geography and it suddenly makes much more sense.
Geography, it turns out, is the key to understanding international relations.
It not only helps make sense of headlines, but it serves to stoke the fires of wanderlust, even during shelter in place orders.
Our kids have always cherished the exquisite Afghan meals during visits to Helmand Palace in San Francisco. By learning where it lies on the map in relation to India, they now connect the culinary relationship of the two cuisines.
We’ve started to explore whether Pakistani, Bhutanese and Nepali cuisine might be the next frontiers in our upcoming culinary peregrinations. Thankfully, living in LA allows us to explore the world’s food without boarding a plane!