Maps

I'm in the teacher's room right now and above me is a map of the world. There is one major problem with it that I just can't get over. It's not the age, all countries seem to be correct; I mean, it's Russia, not the USSR for instance. It's the scale of the map that is ridiculous. We've all grown up seeing maps of the world and I bet we all have at one point thought that Antarctica stretched across the world and that Greenland was bigger than the United States. Obviously, that's not true. Why do we have to see this type of map? I realize that they do help us find where things are but it is quite misleading in telling me the size of countries. I honestly hate maps like this and I'd be happier with a globe that is actually to scale.