A love of maps
One interest of mine is maps. They are most definitely in my list of things that bring joy to my life. As a kid I would sit down and draw maps of the United States over and over, for hours. Occasionally I would even draw my own weird fictionalized version of the United States made up of states all with their own unique name. When I would ride my bike beside the pile of leaves on the ground I would think of how the outlines of the leaves looked like countries. As I would later figure out I was not the only one who had a similar line of thinking, given the rice trick for DND map making.
This map interest would continue into my adolescence as I would keep drawing maps of fictionalized worlds, sometimes resembling those found in the beginning of fantasy novels. Being the time period that it was I wanted to translate this fascination into Minecraft, using the various creation tools like MC Edit. Now this never worked out because I did not possess the technical knowhow at the time and my attention span was too short to try and learn. As I grew older this interest eventually led to me becoming more interested in geography as a whole; including sub-disciplines such as physical, economic, and human geography. With that being said I have always been partial to physical geography probably due to that initial interest in maps and the idea of seeing what the land looks like from above.
All of this eventually leads to me to me studying geography in college and learning more about the discipline as a whole. Nowadays I enjoy reading the Wikipedia entries on the geographies of different countries. If there are regions that I do not know about geographically I always have fun researching them. I also have a tendency to go into detail about physical geography a lot when I teach my social studies classes. With all of that being said I am by no means an expert in the field as there is a lot for me to learn, but I do find happiness in the fact that an interest I had as a kid has stuck with me and led me to becoming fascinated with a whole subject.
Anyway here are some more tangents for you. I love that old maps are so ludicrously wrong. Like some have complete continents that aren’t actually there and others have straight up monsters. With that being said I am interested in how people were A) able to even create maps of such large land masses even if they weren’t necessarily accurate and B)how people’s perception of the world changed as new techniques and technologies were created to make maps more accurate.
