Time to be annoyed again
There are some days where I feel that being annoyed by things is my super power. I don't want it to be, but sometimes I just can't help it. What is it this time, you ask?
Well, this is more of a variation on a familiar theme. Remember when we were traveling through Africa on our 'round the world trip, and I was looking for specific county maps so we could do our map work? And how I discovered that the (highly thought of) resource I was using had exactly one map of Africa, that being the continent? (I am not counting ancient Egypt as part of the count, because that was included for a specific era and not because of the country itself.)
The same thing has happened again. What is worse is that, though it is such a glaring error, it took me a long time to even realize something was missing. We are so conditioned to erase an entire continent in our thinking that we don't even realize it is missing.
But you are still sitting there wondering what the heck I'm talking about. Sorry.
I am teaching a four week co-op class on The Art and Science of the Horse. We're doing a whirlwind tour of the use of the horse through history by looking at the art from those periods. I am loving preparing for it. It is right up my alley and was a terrific excuse to buy a couple (okay, more than a couple) of resources. Earlier this week for our own history lesson, we were reading about early China and the book I was reading from spoke about the terracotta warriors. Children were excited to hear about them because we had seen the travelling exhibit and they had a connection to them. In the back of my head, though, I was thinking, "Hmmm... right time period for what I had been preparing. Horses and chariots by the dozens. I should have included them and must have missed them in my resources," and made a mental note to go back and add them.
This is what I did this evening, except I discovered why I hadn't added them originally... because they weren't there. This seemed like a glaring omission to my mind, and so spent some time adding some information and images to what we would talk about on Tuesday. But this idea of omission got me thinking; what else was missing that I wasn't missing? And it came to me, other than ancient Egypt, the entire continent of Africa was missing. Again.
This led to an internet search (this is what the internet excels at, in my opinion), I discovered there is rock art found in Morocco, Algeria, Sudan, Chad, and Mauritania. I discovered this from five minutes on Google. How difficult would it have been for an author to do the same research. One image I am particularly struck by. It is on a web page from the British Museum, and is of a human figure and a horse. I love the line of the drawing. I love how the artist captured the elegance of the horse, which is probably an early precursor to the Arabian. It is beautiful. It should have been in my books. (Because of copyright, I don't want to just copy the image onto my page here. Click the link and scroll down a bit. You'll see it; it's from Algeria.)
And you know, this stinks. It stinks that the majority culture has so written off an entire continent, a continent with 54 countries and 1.216 billion people, that it could go missing in so many different ways and even those of us even a little bit aware of it could still be oblivious. I can't fix so many problems in this world, but I can at least do my part to acknowledge the fact that a continent and its history and people really does exist and matter.
Well, this is more of a variation on a familiar theme. Remember when we were traveling through Africa on our 'round the world trip, and I was looking for specific county maps so we could do our map work? And how I discovered that the (highly thought of) resource I was using had exactly one map of Africa, that being the continent? (I am not counting ancient Egypt as part of the count, because that was included for a specific era and not because of the country itself.)
The same thing has happened again. What is worse is that, though it is such a glaring error, it took me a long time to even realize something was missing. We are so conditioned to erase an entire continent in our thinking that we don't even realize it is missing.
But you are still sitting there wondering what the heck I'm talking about. Sorry.
I am teaching a four week co-op class on The Art and Science of the Horse. We're doing a whirlwind tour of the use of the horse through history by looking at the art from those periods. I am loving preparing for it. It is right up my alley and was a terrific excuse to buy a couple (okay, more than a couple) of resources. Earlier this week for our own history lesson, we were reading about early China and the book I was reading from spoke about the terracotta warriors. Children were excited to hear about them because we had seen the travelling exhibit and they had a connection to them. In the back of my head, though, I was thinking, "Hmmm... right time period for what I had been preparing. Horses and chariots by the dozens. I should have included them and must have missed them in my resources," and made a mental note to go back and add them.
This is what I did this evening, except I discovered why I hadn't added them originally... because they weren't there. This seemed like a glaring omission to my mind, and so spent some time adding some information and images to what we would talk about on Tuesday. But this idea of omission got me thinking; what else was missing that I wasn't missing? And it came to me, other than ancient Egypt, the entire continent of Africa was missing. Again.
This led to an internet search (this is what the internet excels at, in my opinion), I discovered there is rock art found in Morocco, Algeria, Sudan, Chad, and Mauritania. I discovered this from five minutes on Google. How difficult would it have been for an author to do the same research. One image I am particularly struck by. It is on a web page from the British Museum, and is of a human figure and a horse. I love the line of the drawing. I love how the artist captured the elegance of the horse, which is probably an early precursor to the Arabian. It is beautiful. It should have been in my books. (Because of copyright, I don't want to just copy the image onto my page here. Click the link and scroll down a bit. You'll see it; it's from Algeria.)
And you know, this stinks. It stinks that the majority culture has so written off an entire continent, a continent with 54 countries and 1.216 billion people, that it could go missing in so many different ways and even those of us even a little bit aware of it could still be oblivious. I can't fix so many problems in this world, but I can at least do my part to acknowledge the fact that a continent and its history and people really does exist and matter.
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