It's amazing to me how ignorant these kids are of basic world geography. A lot of them can't even name the seven continents of the world let alone locate them on a map. I kind of get the feeling that they haven't been able to look at maps very much. The juniors couldn't tell me what continent England is in, and the freshman didn't have a clue where to find Egypt. Europe, Asia, South America, and North America were some of the guesses I got as to the location of the latter. Another particularly creative response placed Egypt "in Mesopotamia in North America on the banks of the Nile." At least he got the river right. But my personal favorite showed up on three different papers almost word for word, so it looks like we'll be having a little meeting with the ad. council about academic integrity, or the lack thereof in this case. Sad stuff. Cheating just seems to be a natural and accepted thing to do here. Anyway, I hope we can teach these kids to be honest. And hopefully I can teach them a little geography while I’m at it. So the answer that gave the cheaters away was “Egypt is located in South America, a part of Africa.” Ouch. But my class is not the only place the kids are having trouble. The other teachers are also noticing a general lack of basic knowledge in mathematics, science, literature, and even reading comprehension. Most of the students don’t have any idea how to work with time either. One of the questions John asked on his first quiz was “how many seconds are in a day?” One student’s response was “22.” Another one said “15 minutes or something like that,” and several even went so far as to ask “aren’t seconds and minutes the same thing?” Wow. Unbelievable. These are highschool kids and they have no concept of time or how to work with it. The whole sad situation does seem to shed some light on the culture here however. It’s no wonder that few people are ever on time, events are often late, and exact schedules rarely seem to exist. The question that remains though is whether they don’t want to learn about time because it’s not important to them, or if it’s not important to them because they haven’t learned how to keep it? Are they habitually late because they don’t know how to keep time, or is it because they just don’t think it’s important? And if they don't think its important, why should it matter? What makes me think that I should impose my concept of time on them? I do still think they should know how to figure out how many seconds are in a day though. That's just simple math.