Things to do in boston in march 201712/12/2023 ![]() The district has 125 schools and 57,000 students, 86% of whom are non-white, with the largest groups being Latino and black. “This is the start of a three-year effort to decolonize the curriculum in our public schools,” said Colin Rose, assistant superintendent of opportunity and achievement gaps for Boston public schools. The result goes a long way to rewriting the historical and sociopolitical message of the Mercator map, which exaggerates the size of imperialist powers. It is an “equal-area” map, distorting the shape of countries as a two-dimensional visualization of a three-dimensional globe but accurately scaling surface areas. It matches work by a Scottish 19th-century mapmaker, James Gall, and is also known as the Gall-Peters projection. The German historian Arno Peters published his projection in 1974. Individual schools in the US have used the Peters maps, Scott said, adding: “We believe we are the first public school district in the US to do this.” ‘It’s a paradigm shift’ “Some of their reactions were quite funny,” she added, “but it was also amazingly interesting to see them questioning what they thought they knew.” Natacha Scott, director of history and social studies at Boston public schools, said it was “interesting to watch the students saying ‘Wow’ and ‘No, really? Look at Africa, it’s bigger’”. The Mercator projection shifts the equator and represents Greenland and Africa as roughly the same size Greenland in fact is 14 times smaller. Teachers put contrasting maps of the world side by side and let the students study them. ![]() Three days ago, Boston’s public schools began phasing in the lesser-known Peters projection, which cuts the US, Britain and the rest of Europe down to size. Alaska looks bigger than Mexico and Germany is often right in the middle of the picture, not to the north – because publishers frequently cropped off Antarctica and then re-centered the Mercator map, resulting in the equator appearing two-thirds of the way down the image. For example, South America is made to look about the same size as Europe, when in fact it is almost twice as large, and Greenland looks roughly the size of Africa when it is actually about 14 times smaller. Mercator’s distortions affect continents as well as nations. He also placed western Europe in the middle of his map. An exaggeration of the whole northern hemisphere, his depiction made North America and Europe bigger than South America and Africa. Gerardus Mercator, a renowned Flemish cartographer, devised his map in 1569 to aid navigation along colonial trade routes by drawing straight lines across the oceans. For almost 500 years, the Mercator projection has been one of the most popular maps of the world, common in atlases and pinned on peeling school walls. ![]()
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