Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (22 page)

At the picnic, the light is almost gone, the cookies are almost gone, and the bee parents gather up their kids. The last thing I see before I board my bus back to D.C. is William Johnston and Benjamin Salman, the two architects of imaginary nations, walking together in the twilight, their heads down, talking seriously and animatedly to each other. I have a feeling that the game of plonk is about to arrive on the shores of Alambia.

I expect to hear the familiar National Geographic TV trumpet fanfare the next morning as I walk through the doors of the society’s headquarters between L and M Streets. That’s how “National Geographic” the lobby is: big wise yellow rectangles looming above me on the window glass like the monolith in
2001,
a bathysphere and a sculpture of a silverback gorilla on exhibit to my right, Egyptian hieroglyphics and coral reef photos on the elevator doors. The hall outside Grosvenor Auditorium,
^*
where the finals will be held, has a ceiling pricked with artificial stars, re-creating the constellations as they appeared on the night of January 27, 1888, when the society was founded.

I take a moment to chat with the parents of Eric Yang of Texas,
who made an early mistake in Benjamin Salman’s room during the prelims but bounced back to make the finals. A decade ago, the Yangs emigrated from Singapore, where, I tell them, my family once lived. His mom, Aileen, takes the opportunity to brag about her evidently well-balanced son: he plays jazz piano, earned a 2200 on his SATs at age thirteen, and made the state swimming team. He reads cookbooks obsessively, she says, but doesn’t like to cook much. He dreams of someday going to Belgium. Eric stands by impassively while his litany of accomplishments is paraded before me.

“Your son seems pretty calm,” I tell Aileen. “We say he’s a cucumber!” she agrees, presumably in the “cool-as-a” sense, unless this is some Singaporean vegetable metaphor of which I’m unaware.

“Are you all nervous about the finals?” I ask Aileen.

She shakes her head. “He says, ‘Mom, I don’t have to be a winner. Winning is a blessing.’ “

As I make my way to my seat, I’m stopped by another proud finalist parent, Lorena Golimlim, whose son Kenji was the four-foot-nothing basketball player I’d watched the night before. “Kenji! Can you recite the first two hundred digits of pi for Ken?” He does, with relish.

Apart from Nicholas Farnsworth of Arizona and Kennen Sparks of Utah, all today’s finalists are Asian American, mostly of South Asian descent. This isn’t unexpected; Indian American culture so values this kind of educational success that a nonprofit called the North South Foundation has organized
an elaborate farm system
for Indian bee nerds, holding mock spelling bees, geography bees, and math Olympiads through its seventy-odd chapters nationwide. A more troublesome demographic challenge for National Geographic is the fact that all ten finalists—and fifty-three of the fifty-five national contestants this year—are boys. Only Alaska and Wyoming, the two least populous states in the last census, are represented by girls.

At the picnic, I asked Wyoming’s Kirsi Anselmi-Stith about the disparity, which she chalked up to the social pressures of her age. She shrugged. “The girls are in makeup by now,” she said. “It’s not cool to be a geographer.”

“Is it hard being one of the only girls?”

She grinned. “No, it’s more entertaining. When we walk in the room, everyone gets quiet.” An athletic seventh grader with long blond hair, Kirsi certainly seemed to be getting her share of attention at the picnic. All night she was orbited by five or six boys a head shorter than her, a nervous jumble of orthodontia and Adam’s apples.

The “map gap” between men and women is, of course, a staple of gender debate in our culture, the focus of countless unfunny stand-up routines and syndicated columns about men who refuse to ask for directions or women who can’t find the right highway on the road atlas.
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But in recent years the issue has moved from the Ray Romano/Erma Bombeck sphere into the laboratories of cognitive psychology, with real scrutiny being given to the question of whether (and why) women and men navigate and read maps differently.

In 1995, after boys had won six of the first seven geography bees, National Geographic commissioned two Penn State professors, Lynn Liben and Roger Downs, to study the reasons girls were under-performing. They hoped to find the usual anodyne reasons for a performance gap of this kind: that boys were more competitive or girls more anxious or the questions somehow biased. Instead, the results were a little more troubling.

“Boys as a group
do
have a little more knowledge about geography than girls as a group,” admits Liben. She hastens to add that a field of fifty-three boys and just two girls does
not
mean that boys are twenty-six times better than girls—just that “very tiny” differences tend to get magnified by the bee format of slicing off the top finisher at each of several tiers.

My immediate assumption is that the root of the achievement gap is spatial ability. Tests on gender and navigation have found that women tend to navigate via landmarks (“I turn left when I get to the gas station”) whereas men use dead reckoning (“I still need to be north and maybe a little west of here”), which ties in nicely with the evolutionary perspective: early men went out on hunting expeditions in
all directions and always needed to be good at finding their way back to the cave, developing their “kinesic memory,” while women foraged for edibles closer to home, developing “object location memory.” Simply put, men got better at finding places, while women got better at finding things. Fast forward twenty thousand years, and I exasperate my wife by not being able to see my car keys even when they’re sitting on the dresser right in front of me. Meanwhile, I laugh at her tendency to turn a map upside down if it’s not facing the “right” way. “Mindy, turning the map doesn’t actually rearrange the symbols on it in any way,” I will say, rolling my eyes, while she ignores me and silently ponders what a divorce settlement would look like now that we live in a community-property state. But many, many other people are map-turner-upside-downers just like she is. In 1998,
John and Ashley Sims
invented an upside-down map that would make southward travel easier for non–mental rotators like Mindy. A series of male map executives turned the idea down before a woman heard about it, immediately saw the appeal, and signed on. Three hundred thousand upside-down maps have since been sold.
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I wonder if the same factors account for the sudden omnipresence of GPS navigation in cars and smart phones: finally, ladies, a map that will turn itself upside down automatically while you turn! I tend to switch our GPS to the other map view—you know, the one where north actually stays north while you drive—which annoys my wife when she next hops into the car. It’s the cartographic equivalent of leaving the toilet seat up.

The biological gap “is not huge, but it’s there,” Liben confirms. “It’s maybe
the
only remaining cognitive difference between boys and girls.” But she cautions that any number of societal factors could be causing those small differences to snowball. “We know that boy babies are tossed around more than girl babies. Boys are allowed to ride their bicycles farther than girls are—we know they explore more. These are the kinds of things that are going to increase your environmental knowledge, the chance that you can look at a map and figure out how to get somewhere.” These little environmental nudges can last all
through life. Liben points out that even in an age when two working spouses are often equal partners in cooking, shopping, and housekeeping, the family car is the last bastion of 1950s gender roles: men nearly always drive. This isn’t true in our car—when we go someplace together, Mindy often ends up behind the wheel. Of course, that’s only because she’d rather be the driver than the one stuck with reading the map, so I haven’t exactly disproved Liben’s point.

For her part, Mary Lee Elden thinks the aptitude gap is small enough that it can be closed with outreach. “It’s a matter of interest level,” she says. “How can we get more girls interested?” She points to the campaign, twenty years ago, to attract women to medicine. “Fifty-one percent of medical school students are now women. The big push was ‘Girls, you can do it.’ Well, I think the same thing for geography. We just need to tell the girls they can win it too.”

The ten finalists, now all dressed in matching blue shirts with a National Geographic Bee logo, are seated in two tiers at the left side of the auditorium stage, which has been decorated for the occasion with a dramatically lit map of the seven continents set against a grid of blue translucent squares reminiscent of the
Jeopardy!
set. Out strides Alex Trebek to complete the game-show illusion. “These ten finalists,” says the forty-year quiz veteran, “are about to dazzle everyone with their knowledge of the Earth and everything on it and in it.” Besides the $25,000 giant check, this year’s champion will also win a cruise—not the fun, frivolous
Wheel of Fortune
kind of cruise, of course, but a soberly educational filmstrip of a cruise: a visit to the Galápagos Islands with Alex Trebek himself aboard! But National Geographic has judged its target demographic correctly: the ten finalists bounce excitedly in their seats at this announcement.

After the first round, Alex takes a minute to chat with each of the contestants in turn. The mini-interviews on
Jeopardy!
are so cringe-inducing that many viewers TiVo right through them, but these ten kids are charming and genuine. Alex, a father of two himself, seems perfectly at ease and much warmer than usual as he chats with them. There are some signs of nerves—Vansh Jain’s little cheeks puffing in
and out, Zaroug Jaleel rocking from side to side—but for the most part, the kids seem remarkably poised, with none of the unpredictable, outsized personalities I remember from National Spelling Bee coverage. All seem to have charmingly old-timey hobbies: stamp collecting, chess, archery, ballroom dancing. Arjun Kandaswamy of Oregon, the most mature-seeming of the boys, describes his Eagle Scout project, and Shiva Kangeyan blithely banters with Alex about models of World War II–era planes.

The second round opens with a National Geographic employee wheeling out a Chinese mime made up as a terra-cotta warrior, so that Alex can ask a question about China’s Shaanxi Province. Caitlin Snaring had warned me about this.

“At nationals, they bring out objects to distract you! ‘This is the tool they use to fork out people’s brains in Fiji!’ So you don’t pay attention to that.” The visual aids range from ancient artifacts to live animals—penguins, maybe, or armadillos. Last year, a nervous kookaburra caused some excitement by leaving a little souvenir onstage during its brief appearance.

“Well, they use them to entertain the audience,” her mom had explained. This less sinister explanation hadn’t even occurred to Caitlin. Anything that interrupted her laserlike focus
was the enemy
!

Kennen Sparks of Utah and Zaroug Jaleel of Massachusetts both misidentify the major river of Shaanxi Province as the Yangtze (it’s the Yellow). Then, two rounds later, they both miss questions on archaeological sites, making them the first two finalists to be eliminated. I notice, during this round, that the questions the kids struggle with aren’t always the ones you expect. Shantan Krovvidi of North Carolina earns a strike for not knowing that Salisbury is the closest city to Stonehenge, while Kennen goes out for guessing that the largest city in the West Bank is Jerusalem. (It’s actually Hebron.) These are reasonably well-known bits of cultural literacy, but the kids blank on them, even as they nail much harder questions about the Turkish city of Izmir or the islands of Vanuatu. Their knowledge has come from a firehose blast of atlases and encyclopedias, not a lifetime of travel and media. It isn’t lived in, like ours.

A Smithsonian curator enters, holding a gorilla skull for the kids
to ignore while they’re asked for the name of the East African chain of volcanoes in which mountain gorillas live. Four boys fail to come up with the name of the Virunga Mountains, including Siva Gangavarapu, who—heartbreakingly—wrote “Virunga Mts” on his card, then crossed it out and began to write “Rwenzori” as time expired. Each time someone walks offstage, the pace of play accelerates, the next round becoming just a little bit shorter. Suddenly, half the seats are empty.

The next three rounds of questions eliminate one contestant apiece, in the orderly manner of a children’s counting rhyme. (“Ten Little Indian Americans”?) Kenji’s little Auto-Tuned chirp of a voice, so reliable in earlier rounds, is unable to identify Mexicali, Mexico, in his allotted twelve seconds, and then there were four. Ten-year-old Vansh doesn’t know that Clew Bay is in Ireland, and then there were three. Finally, in the tenth round, Shantan is stumped on the name of a Bulgarian port city. After his incorrect guess, he looks to his left: Eric Yang hasn’t missed a single question, but Arjun and Shantan each entered the round with one strike against them. If Arjun misses his question as well, Shantan will get a new lease on life and could still make the finals.

“Arjun, which South American country has phased out its former currency, the sucre, and adopted the United States dollar as its official currency?”

Arjun bites his lip. “Ecuador?” he tries.

“Ecuador is right!” announces Alex. Arjun lowers his head and pumps his fists quietly. Shantan has just won the third-place prize, a $10,000 scholarship, but he still looks awfully unsatisfied as he turns off his mike and rises to walk into the wings. He was so close.

The two finalists, Eric and Arjun, switch seats for the finals. Alex will stand at a lectern between them on the lower tier as they each use paper cards to write answers to the same questions. Whoever answers more of the five final questions correctly is the champion.