John Fleishman’s book, Phineas Gage; A Gruesome but True Story about Brain Science is The perfect text to use in order to demonstrate how useful maps can be in breaking down difficult texts. Although a relatively short nonfiction work, Phineas Gage is both a biography of railway worker who suffered a “horrible accident” as well as a study of nineteenth century science and, in particular, nineteenth century brain science. In 1848 Gage was a railroad worker in charge of a demolition crew who become famous when he was involved in an accident with explosives that should have killed him, but instead made him the most famous brain science patient of his time. There is a lot of science in the book: discussion of the four bodily humors, the development of medicines like penicillin, the discovery of cell and how cells function, the way the brain was once thought to function and what we have learned about brain science. Fleishman weaves a host of complicated topics in and out of the biography of Gage, and as my unit will reveal, there are many places to use maps to help students to breakdown the text and get a better understanding of the many subjects introduced in the book.
Maps in this unit will serve as a more dynamic and multifaceted graphic organizer and learning tool that can be utilized in not only Language Arts classes, but in all classes as teachers experience how useful maps are in engaging and making complex text more readily available to students on so many levels. Through this unit I hope that teachers will gain a new appreciation for maps and the role that maps can and should play in our classrooms and learning. I also hope that students will gain not only a new appreciation for the maps that have always been and are still all around us, but they will also be introduced to a genre that many have rarely explored as we examine travel writing. Finally, I hope that students will gain an appreciation for the journey: not only Phineas Gage’s journey, or a number of other journeys that we will discuss, but their own journey, a journey through life that we are constantly mapping and revising. It is always important to reflect on our journey and what better way to reflect than with the help of a good map.
