It's a Small World: Minnesota in the Textbooks

Midterms start next week, so a lot of my coworkers are busy writing tests. The atmosphere in the staff room has a serious tone to it, and people are spending more than the usual amount of time with their noses to the grindstone. Yesterday afternoon, however, one of my colleagues came running up to me with her book, excited by something she had just realized while planning a test.

“Read this! Read this!” she exclaimed.

I looked at the textbook. From the TRACK series, OK. It was a lesson on shopping, OK. Alright, pretty standard so far. I kept reading, and here is what I found in Part II:

People like malls for many reasons. They feel safe because malls have police stations or private security guards. Parking is usually free, and the temperature inside is always comfortable. The newest malls have beautiful rest areas with waterfalls and palm trees.

The largest mall in the United States is the Mall of America in Minnesota. It covers 4.2 million square feet. It has 350 stores, eight nightclubs, and a seven-acre amusement park! There are parking spaces for 12,750 cards. About 75,000 people shop there every week.
The first indoor mall in the United States was built in 1965 in Edina, Minnesota. People loved doing all their shopping in one place. Many more malls were built all over the country. Now, malls are like town centers where people come to do many things. They shop, of course. They also eat in food courts, or eating areas, that have food from all over the world. They see movies at multiplex theaters, which give moviegoers a good number of movie choices. Some people even get their daily exercise by doing the new sport of “mall walking.” Others fo to malls to meet friends.

Oh my gosh! MINNESOTA!?! Alright, so maybe this does not seem like a big deal to you, but I thought it was pretty cool. In my little world, most people hardly know where Minnesota is (and often think I come from a place "near Chicago"). To see my state - and especially the names of places from my specific hometown area - was an exciting suprise. It's also kind of crazy to think that this is the material being used in standardized, public school textbooks to teach students all over the country English.

On an amusing note, the teachers were also really grateful that I taught them how to correctly pronounce Edina ("EE- DIE - NA" is near Minneapolis) since they had been teaching the kids to say it incorrectly in classes (some variation of "A-dina"). One even gave me an orange to thank me for their help, even though I insisted that most Americans wouldn't know how to say it correctly...including people from Wisconsin!