IT’S NOT ALL MAPS AND FLAGS.

It’s also not all psychological disorders in AP Psychology or laundry lists of names, dates, and events in AP US History.

Every year, I wait for it. Sometime in the first few weeks of AP (Advanced Placement) Human Geography, a student raises a hand and asks, “Why do you have an upside-down map?”

I love that question because it shows that the student realizes that a map isn’t just a picture of the world. It’s a choice about how to show it. Who decided north goes on top? What gets made bigger, what gets made smaller, and who benefits?

Flipping the map changes what’s on top. This September, the UN General Assembly took up what gets bigger, voting to encourage the world to move away from the Mercator projection toward maps that show countries’ true relative sizes. Whatever you think of the resolution, it makes the point my students are about to discover: maps don’t just show us where things are. They shape what we think matters.

That’s the kind of thinking I want my students doing, and it points to something bigger. Geography, psychology, and history are more than their recognizable content. If that’s true, teaching them has to be about more than making sure students know that content.

Many students are surprised that they won’t be labeling, coloring, and taking quizzes over maps in my class. They will still look at maps, images, graphs, and charts, but they’ll use geographic concepts and processes to make meaning of what they notice. Some of my AP Psychology students are surprised that we won’t be talking about psychological disorders on day 2…or serial killers. Ever. They will learn to categorize disorders, but only after examining what research says about “normal” mental processes and human behavior. And in AP US History, students expect to learn names, dates, and events. They do learn them, but those form the basis for contextualization and for the historical reasoning skills of causation, comparison, and continuity and change over time.

It’s not that maps, flags, psychological disorders, names, and dates aren’t important. In AP Human Geography, for example, students certainly need to know where places are located, and labeling, coloring, and quizzing can help them learn that. But those activities don’t necessarily help students explain why people and things are located where they are, how those locations shape human relationships, or how human activity affects the physical environment. Students need opportunities to practice that kind of thinking, too. And I suspect they need more time than we give them - me included - to practice it.

The same is true in psychology and history. Knowing psychological concepts and processes isn’t the same as using research to explain human behavior, just as knowing historical events isn’t the same as analyzing the causes and consequences of change over time.

To be clear, I’m not throwing shade at teachers who have students label and color maps and take map quizzes. Those activities have a purpose, and I’ve used them myself. And if you want to take a detour to talk about serial killers as a way to launch your psychological disorders unit? You’re the professional who knows your students, their parents, and your admin. My point isn’t that there’s one right way to teach these courses. It’s that whatever else we do, students also need chances to practice the thinking.

So how often do we treat that thinking as something students will figure out along the way, rather than something they need to learn and practice? Especially in AP classes, where the pressure to cover a LOT of content is real, how do we make time for students to do the thinking that makes the content worth learning? What might teaching and learning look like if we started with what these disciplines help us understand, rather than with the content we need to cover? I plan to explore that in the next post.

I have way more questions than answers. I’m still learning after 31 years in the classroom. What’s one thing you wish your students understood about the subject you teach beyond its recognizable content? I’d love to hear in the comments.

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