The implementation of the recent geography curriculum in the classroom requires further review. This study aims to identify Indonesian geography teachers' understanding of the written geography curriculum at the senior high school, which comprises cognitive activities terms, the meaning of activities demanded in the curriculum and the organization of topics. The content analysis method is applied to interpret teachers' understanding by measuring data against a standard or criteria. In addition to explaining the influencing factors, document analysis is carried out to identify the presence of a conceptual framework and the problems of the meaning of concepts in written curriculum. The findings of this study are: (a) teachers' understanding of terms engaging students in cognitive activities is limited to lower-order thinking, (b) the majority of teachers do not really understand that the purpose of the use of active learning methods is to foster thinking, and (c) most teachers perceive the topics merely as a collection of fragmented or unconnected concepts and skills. To sum up, geography teaching and learning do not move considerably from traditional inventory and fact-based approaches that focus on "what" and "where." Furthermore, this study found that problems in the written curriculum contribute to the teachers' difficulties in understanding topics and learning activities. It is concluded that gaps exist between the written curriculum and the taught curriculum of what teachers actually deliver in the classroom and between the written curriculum and the recommended curriculum. This study suggests aligning these geography curricula.