Great read. Well done. Well done, indeed.

I begin with a story. Several years ago, I managed our county’s “Artists in Residence” program (grades k-12). Instead of art for art’s sake, our artists taught the curriculum through the arts. Teachers identified the weakness in their classrooms, and their resident artist focused on that part of the curriculum. For example, a theatre artists focused on reading skills. When one theatre artist discovered parents were not reading to their children, she organized a workshop and taught parents various voice, acting skills, etc. By mid-morning parents were in a large circle, taking turns reading a script out loud using different voices. Parents lost their inhibitions and poured themselves into their character - their alternate (cool). Suffice to say, their kids reading scores skyrocketed.

One of our artists specialized in high school geography. After a few weeks, students came to class to discover their artist had replaced their wall sized Mercator map of the world with a wall-sized world map drawn to scale. The kids went crazy – laughing, joking and absolutely positive it was a joke. This little lesson turned Richard’s students into fact checkers – “what else did they lie about” was the most common remark by his students. “A lot” was Richard’s reply.

That map thing you mentioned is a big deal – bigger than you might think. Its none of my business, but if you inserted the two different maps in your essay, I think it would make people think harder.

You see, we humans believe our eyes, we trust our eyes and we believe what we see. For that reason, visual information bypasses our filters and biases and registers directly in the brain. Seeing the two maps side by side (not top and bottom) will make people so UN-comfortable, they will use their eyes – the sensory organ they trust more than a book, a story or an authority to work it out. At the very least, you will have planted a contradiction in their minds (and that will nag at them).

Before I wrote my comment, I tried it on myself. I know better. I’ve worked with these maps. But that didn’t matter. I was still surprised by the differences, for I’d learned geography from a Mercator map and that’s the map that's stuck in my brain. Anyways, you hit on something valuable and thought to comment.