Being in my own little bubble, I didn’t know about the Miss Teen South Carolina maps gaff until yesterday. It blew my mind. For those who haven’t seen it (via Morning Toast):
Collin Brooke has a pretty good discussion about “teaching to the test” and how this woman was given a question that none of her “answers” fit.
But let’s look at it from another angle. Well, I think two angles are good enough.
1. Perhaps this woman is actually a genius and this is a meta-commentary on the status of our education, with an intentionally convoluted train of thought that leads us no where and everywhere all at once. Of course one in five American children cannot find the United States on a map, she is saying, because they don’t have quality maps of any sort. She’s really moralizing. Why are you looking at me? I’m just a pretty face. Why are you watching television? Is this giving you a quality moral map? Why are you following Bush to “the Iraq”? Is that a good map?
A Boing Boing reader also suggests she is pioneering a new art form: “a combination of Hindi Ghazal poetry and blank verse”:
The themes are clear; she’s worried about the way we are reacting to the war on terror, the way Osama Bin Laden still is free, and the way that we are being “educated”. The irony is simply dripping from the last stanza. She was able to deliver this call to revolution absolutely deadpan, cunningly pulling the wool over America’s eyes- and people here have the temerity to mock her intellectual accomplishments? She is the latter-day heir to Rosa Luxemborg- only, without the boathook.
2. The way this video and reactions to it are reproducing is fascinating. My favorite is the sudden focus on and abundance of maps. MapsforUs.org, for example, started a blog where people “donate” maps to US Americans:
MapsforUs.org is the online home, where people can donate maps to the citizens of the United States.
From South Africa to Iraq, the world is alarmed at the recent polls that show a fifth of Americans can’t locate the US on a world map. We personally believe that it a crisis of epic proportions that US Americans are unable to do so, because some people out their in our nation don’t have maps.
And we believe that our education, like such as in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere…like. Such as. And we believe you should donate maps to this cause.
Morning Toast also has a map of Miss Teen South Carolina’s answer to the question (which is funny!). I think this map meme is a-maze-ing. From my favorite post on MapsforUs.org:
EDIT: I sent a map in to Maps For Us. Here’s the response:
Michael! The children of US America thank you for your link!
You would be surprised at how many kids suffering come from Oregon and its neighboring states. In fact, just yesterday, one of them from Massachusetts asked us about traveling to the OMNI or such. We nipped that in the bud. We don’t have any free afternoons now that we’re so busy at Mapsforus headquarters.
Life can be hard when you’re an orphan who doesn’t get what he wants.
Something to think about.
Thanks again!
But consider Steve Duin’s commentary in the Oregonian yesterday which is far more compassionate than the other hoots and hollers
Unable to find empathy on the map.
And consider Duin’s point that “it is more than a little ironic that the vacuous question given the eventual winner of the Miss Teen USA Pageant, Hilary Carol Cruz from Colorado, was: who do you like the most — Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie or Lindsay Lohan.”
By comparison Caitlin Upton was given a serious weighty question and she struggled to answer it both literally — can’t find it on a map because they don’t have maps and don’t know how to read maps – not “map literate” – after all, why would anyone need to know how to read a map when Google maps finds everything for you?
I hope Duin is right that “For all I know, only a slim minority of people still take pleasure, or solace, in the embarrassment of others, and talk radio and the Internet have simply allowed them to billboard their bitterness. […]With the TV cameras zooming in, and victory within reach, Caitlin Upton was asked about geography and stupidity, and ended up looking only familiar with the latter. She barely heard the question, she later told Ann Curry and Matt Lauer on the “Today” show: “I was overwhelmed and I made a mistake.” That’s the risk you take when you submit to being judged by the quality of your makeup and the contents of your bathing suit. You invite ridicule and rejection. When you stumble and fall, your disaster is a teachable moment for everyone still teetering on the edge. And you never know: When the embarrassment becomes particularly public and excruciating, other TV shows are available to milk the moment. I understand all that. What I don’t understand is how anyone with an ounce of empathy […] can sit gleefully through that video and find cause for laughter or celebration. I wonder what they see. The comeuppance of a beauty queen? The consequence of pride? The triumph of disappointment? Anything, in other words, except a vulnerable, impressionable, overwhelmed teenage girl.”
Having embarrassed myself with nervous fumbling stupid answers when suddenly put on the spot unable to think fast, I feel so sorry for her and angry at those who look down and laugh in a superior way.
Now I have to learn more about Peters Projection maps myself. Thanks for this, Michael!
Hi, Michael. And thanks, Sara, for the link to Steve Duin’s comments. I was starting to feel uncomfortable, too, with many of the reactions to Cailtin’s answer: a wee-bit smarter-than-thou. Some downright ugly. So thanks — I appreciated Duin’s wisdom.
And thanks for the link to Collin Brooke, Michael. He’s probably right, that Caitlin was coached as to how to answer the questions intelligently. You can hear it in the phrases “unable to do so” and “such as.” It’s a lot like Bartholomae’s essay examples from “basic” student writers in “Inventing the University.”
However incoherent, though, she could have done a lot worse than trying (if not at all successfully) to move from her initial answer (Americans need maps) to something deeper and more provocative (helping other countries so that “we’ll be able to build up our futures”).
It’s too bad, also, that she felt as if she couldn’t answer the question in her own voice, without putting on the face of feigned intelligence. She might’ve come across more clearly. Definitely more genuinely. And she might’ve even been insightful.
Laura