Cultural Diversity – How Many Continents Are There?

I am working with several iTalki.com Spanish teachers/tutors from different countries to get a wide range of accents and styles. Every couple weeks I visit with a young woman, Micaela, from Coca, Ecuador.  Coca is in the northern part of the country at the confluence of 2 or 3 rivers in what looks to me to be Amazonian Jungle.  I do know the primary industry of this town is petroleum.

Micaela is very personable, very intelligent and a great conversationalist. She is trained as an accountant, which in this country would imply a 4 year college degree.   I’m not sure what her educational background is, I need to ask next time I talk to her.  I frequently feel she is playing devil’s advocate with me. I do not know if she is naturally argumentative or if it is just a gambit to keep the conversation flowing.  Either way it works for me.  It is not uncommon for us to go over our allocated hour with our discussions.

Today part of our conversation involved on how many continents there are in the world.  I was taught and have always thought there were seven.  She kept telling me there were six, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica and The Americas.

Mainly due to my frequently spotty comprehension of Spanish, I thought she was talking culturally, and my conversation dealt with it that way.  After about 10 or 15 minutes of chasing the same squirrel around the same tree, I realized she was speaking geographically. Apparently, at least in Ecuador, they are taught that there are six continents.  They do not separate the Americas into North America and South America like we do.

We then tried to ascertain if there were 7 continents what did North America consist of.  The Encyclopaedia  Britannica website has North America as Canada, the USA, Greenland, all of Central America and included most of the Caribbean Islands.  For some reason I have always thought of North America as the USA and Canada.  A while back I heard a Mexican refer to herself as a “Norteamericana“.  I raised an eyebrow and begin wondering what the definition actually included and where did the division between North and South America take place.

Over the next couple weeks I am going to ask my other teachers/tutors, who are from Central America, what they were taught.

Who would have thunk…

Keep well.

Okay… I am perseverating on this topic!

So, I had a lesson with my teacher in Guatemala. He tells me there are 6 continents, 7 if you count the new discovered submerged continent of Zealandia.

I emailed my Canadian friend and he tells me the teach 7 continents in the schools up there.

I had a lesson with the gentleman from El Salvador.  When I asked him how many continents there are, he started geeing and hawing.  When I asked him how many are taught in the schools there he said 5.  They do not teach Antarctica as a continent.

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