The important thing to comprehend is that people have maps in their heads for the places they live, so many seldom use a road name (or refer to a two-dimensional map) to comprehend where the borders or grids in their heads are at work. Meanwhile, American tourists traveling through these countries are looking in vain for street names on maps they have come across.

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Are you aware that most people on this planet do not perceive Maps nor Directions in the same way Americans do?

I have always loved the song by U2 entitled Where the Streets Have No Name. It was performed on their album entitled the Joshua Tree.

In summer of 1986, I was driving in the deserts of the USA en route to Joshua Tree National Park in southern California.

Only one year later, in 1987, as I listened to a recording of that tune by U2 called Where the Streets Have No Name, and I recalled my first west-coast trip through America's painted deserts and arches, I thought of one ghost town I had come across. Consequently, I thought that the song, Where the Streets Have No Name, likely alluded to America's many western roads which might have no known name to them and leading almost to nowhere.

Japan & East Asia

In 1992, I moved to Japan to teach and came to realize that most people in Japan did not really refer too often to most roads by names. In fact, rather than using street names to assist in mailing letters, a different sort of grid system of identifying a building's location were used--much like Google Maps use in providing directions using a global grid system.

In Tokyo, Kyoto and other cities, people get around on grids and usually travel by knowing grids or looking at grid maps of a city or town more often than looking for particular street names on a map. So, more than one of my American teaching colleagues referred to Japan as the place Where the Streets Have No Name. This using grids can also be used three-dimensionally to view the movement of people through tunnels and bridges connecting buildings with other buildings and structures.

Taiwan, the Koreas, China and other Asian regions also keep in mind three-dimensional grids rather than street names when moving large numbers of peoples and vehicles around.

Latin America

Meanwhile, by the mid-1990s, I had moved to, worked in, traveled in, and studied in lands from Mexico south to Ecuador and Peru. In Nicaragua, I realized again that the American view of streets and street names was usually a foreign one. My rented location in Managua had the mailing address of "100 meters Southeast of the Old Cinema."

Let me note that the Old Cinema (referred to in my mailing address) had been torn down more than a decade earlier--yet the reference was still made to the Old Cinema as a ghostlike bus-stop for the same period. From the bus stop, the postman knew to take letters in various directions.

I lived in another location that was addressed for postal purposes as about "300 meters from the old Power Plant". This particular power plant had been replaced with a tiny converter or transformer station, but the name had stayed the same--even though everything--including the transformer--were surrounded by trees and overgrowth.

The important thing to comprehend is that people have maps in their heads for the places they live, so many seldom use a road name (or refer to a two-dimensional map) to comprehend where the borders or grids in their heads are at work. Meanwhile, American tourists traveling through these countries are looking in vain for street names on maps they have come across.

From Africa to the Middle East and on to Southeast Asia

My wife is from the Philippines and agrees that in her country, most people outside of Manila (and a few other locations in that 7100+ island archipelago) have maps in their head that simply relate to the relationship of one place to the other; i.e., rather than looking at street names as a final destination. For example, she notes, "We say it is round the corner from X. X is a building, not a street. We might say that from this building, we turn right and then left at the corner."

Corners are important and turning left or right, but street names are not so important to Filipinos in guiding themselves or visitors through their towns. This is because many streets don't have obvious names found anywhere. Perhaps there is a name of a street on a city or government map but none is posted in any helpful way in most locations.

This lack of posting signs is something I have observed in 9 of the 13 countries I have lived in (and taught in) around the world over the past 3-plus decades. (Since 1999, I have lived in the Philippines, Mexico, Taiwan, Kuwait, the UAE, Oman, and Germany. In the 1980s I lived in or worked in a few other European countries, like Spain, the UK, and France.)

Teaching Foreign-born Students Culture & Language in the USA

Since last year I have been back in the USA teaching immigrants and refugees. After we have been studying a bit about the various regions of the USA, I usually have my students attempt to create their own maps of the USA. The exercise is intended to help them to understand that the USA has a specialized two-dimensional view of maps, grids and locations. Many foreigners live in the USA for years without being able to find their way around areas outside their own immediate neighborhood without google maps helping them to get about--or asking someone else to drive them (making them dependent on others to get around).

As students create their maps, I find that nearly half of the foreign-born students whom I work with have trouble working with and drawing maps, but so do ever more American-born students these days--as they become dependent on Google maps or others to move them around the USA and its cities and towns.

Simply put, to create a map--either by copying, tracing, or drawing--requires a lot of patience and persistence. One must learn from one's mistakes--erase, study, and redraw. This skill is evidently not practiced much anymore.

Yet, the drawing of maps of my students also shows that students from other lands are happy to wrestle with the idea of borders and the emphasis that American development placed on city and state planning over the 19th and 20th centuries. This development affects the way Americans perceive the world.

This American state and city planning had emphasized making it clear when someone crosses over one border or road to another.

For this reason, some parts of Kansas and Missouri are labeled with street names, like State Line Road or County Line Roads.

In addition, signs welcome often us to each new county or state with state Line Roads between neighboring counties and states.

Due to rivers, hills and mountains, almost no city is a perfect grid, so street names that cross diagonally through a town or city are important too.

Similarly, river and mountain roads are important everywhere to distinguish one people from another in terms of wealth, power, and status. In this way, too, maps distinguish Americans by region based on which states border each others and which ones have most interstate connections with one another.

in summary, I have become so sensitized to the fact that other peoples around the globe (from Africa to Asia and back to Latin America) think of traveling through spaces around (a city or around an entire country) quite differently than most Americas do.

This is possibly because of (1) how earlier generation were taught to drive cars and (2) how many cities and states were built on grids of streets with names clearly labeled. [1] The settlements of the USA followed the Ohio planning model in creating most cities and towns west of the Appalachians starting in the early 1790s through modern times. In any case, understanding how we create our own maps (in our heads or on paper) to understand our world is an important concept for thinking teachers and students to be aware of.

NOTE

[1] As well, until the most recent generation, most Americans in elementary school were forced to draw maps of the entire country (at least one time if not several times over a 2- to 4-year period, usually starting in grades 3, 4, and 5). Now, with so much reliance on computers, laptops, printers, screens, and cellphones, American youth are becoming less interested in both driving and in learning the discipline of reading and drawing maps--which earlier generations of teachers in social studies classes had thought was important for youth to come to know.

Authors Website: http://eslkevin.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/3-big-paradigms-hol

Authors Bio:

KEVIN STODA-has been blessed to have either traveled in or worked in nearly 100 countries on five continents over the past two and a half decades.--He sees himself as a peace educator and have been-- a promoter of good economic and social development--making-him an enemy of my homelands humongous DEFENSE SPENDING and its focus on using weapons to try and solve global issues.

"I am from Kansas so I also use the pseudonym 'Kansas' and 'alone' when I write and publish.- I-keep two blogs--one with BLOGGER and one with WORDPRESS.- My writings range from reviews to editorials or to travel observations.- I also make recommendations related to policy--having both a-strong background in teaching foreign languages and degrees in teaching in history and the social sciences.--As a Midwesterner, I also write on religion and living out ones faith whether it be as a Christian, Muslim or Buddhist perspective."

On my own home page, I also provide information for language learners and travelers http://www.geocities.com/eslkevin/-,- http://the-teacher.blogspot.com/-& http://alone.gnn.tv/

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