Geographic Memories Are Shared Teachers Tell Peers What They Did On Summer Vacation

They trekked through caves, tromped through swamps, were poked by ticks and prickled by poison ivy.

All for the love of geography.

Last summer, Coeur d’Alene’s Nicole Sweet and Boise’s Carolynn Hussman were the elite pair selected from Idaho for National Geographic’s summer training for teachers. Saturday they shared with two dozen teachers the finer points of conducting a poor man’s field trip, illustrating a bear’s voracious need for food, and building simple lab instruments.

It’s the sort of thing Sweet and Hussman tested in the pouring rain of West Virginia, along the shores of the Potomac River, in the Smoke Hill Caverns and the Canaan Valley (Va.) Refuge. They were briefed by one of President Clinton’s speech coaches, foreign ambassadors, and Gil Grosvenor, chairman of the National Geographic Society.

The society has put $85 million into such training since 1985 so students will learn to appreciate geography’s essential thread in all aspects of life. Teachers from all 50 states, Canada and Puerto Rico attend.

“A lot of people think (geography) is just where the states are,” said Sweet, who teaches fifth grade at Sorensen Elementary School. “Geography is all around us. It’s in everything we do.”

From Burley to Coeur d’Alene, Sweet and Hussman are holding weekend seminars, sharing their new geography teaching tools with teachers. Some of the ingredients are as simple as a Snickers bar and a map.

Identify the ingredients of a Snickers bar, and determine what countries they come from, Sweet explained. Locate those countries on a map. Consider what happens if there’s say a peanut fungus outbreak in the country that grows the peanuts.

Suddenly, students realize how geography affects them, she said.

This and other methods beat reading it from a book. “It gets students up out of their chairs,” Sweet said.

“It gets them to participate.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo