What I learned from comparing my map and other’s by Masakazu Kimura

At the first class of Academic English 2, Professor Stan told us to draw a map of the world with the sort time. I surmised that almost every student have ever seen the world map before and have a brief idea what is actually looks like. In my case, I had seen map many times, but I didn’t have clear idea for shapes of the lands and its locations. Also, we had only short time to conjecture and draw a map. Thus, what did I do first was that I drew the shape of Japan in the center of the paper and added circle and square for other continents. While I was satisfied with my rough map, I was also wondering why we are drawing map in English class.

When the time went up, we were told to stand up and look around other student’s world map. What I saw was a lot of different maps from mine. Some were intelligibly and specific but on the other hand, some students were making world map with only circles. Watching different maps, I discerned one idea and my wonder were solved. Then what was the idea I discern? It was the cultural and personality differences.

As I've mentioned before, I made the world map which Japan is drawn in the center, but because there are many exchange students from many countries in GS class, they put their own country as a center of the map. Also, while I drew Japan’s shape intelligibly and made it determined as much as I could, other students drew not Japan but other countries where they are came from. Two things that I really surprised were some students also put north and south poles and the International Date Line and the style of the map. I never thought about putting these minor parts such as International Date Line. Because not all students in English class came from same place, they were thought to draw the world map or think differently. Furthermore, in general, map is drawn in two dimensional, but some student drew with three dimensional and I was impressed strongly. It is easy to discover the cultural and personal differences with comparing several maps. 

After checking other students’ maps, we were told to draw the map again. With new idea from other maps, I added many things like north and south poles to my maps and made my maps more comprehensible to other people. Many students were influenced by high quality maps and almost everyone copied the idea of that map, so eventually, most of the maps became similar at the end. With this result, we can recognize human are easily influenced if there are great models.

             

According to these results, we learned people have own style to do or draw something and that own style came from their culture, environment, education and personality. Also, this experiment gave interesting facts that human are easily to get influenced by better thing. This experience wasn’t just a practice to draw a map clearly. Because I knew only one way to do things, it was good experience to know that there are a lot of ways to do things and I interpret that it is important to understand and be open mind for the different culture, education, environment and personality each person has. 

Masakazu Kimura