At the center of this unit is the students’ journals. As we read Phineas Gage and follow both his internal journey as well as his actual physical journey, the journal becomes a place for a reflective documentation of the book as well as a creative outlet where the exploration of maps and text can be recorded and intertwined. At the same time, more practical aspects of a language arts class should can also be explored through journal writing. The juggling of text, maps, the concept of travel writing and responding to literature all come together to become the end product of the unit, the travel journal based on the reading.
I will also use my own personal travels and experience following maps and writing about distant lands. One of my favorite articles was entitled Searching for Koxinga, in which I attempted to retell the story of Koxinga, a Japanese born explorer who invaded Tainan, Taiwan in the seventeenth century. I will tell the students my story with the article and some photos I can share with students.
During the pandemic, my students have gotten used to writing in digital journals, which they decorate and make their own much like the journals we regularly write in during a normal school year. Students can log in as a fellow traveler as we follow Phineas from New England to New York, from Boston to Santiago and then onto California. Students can sketch maps of the trans-continental railroad, the rocky coast of New England and the dangerous sea route around Cape Horn and up the coast of South America. Students will fill in the blanks in what we don’t know about Phineas’ life away from the US as they imagine the trip across the oceans, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the East Coast onto the coast of California in their journals.
The journal will also serve as a stepping off point for students for a non-fiction research paper that students will write as part of New Haven Public Schools 7th grade curriculum. My hopes are that as students work through their journals, mapping and following Phineas Gage, they will find topics of interest that later will be the subjects of research papers which they will write (not included in this unit).
Possible journal prompts (in general order of occurrence throughout the unit):
- Draw a map of our school neighborhood.
- Write an entry introducing your journal character.
- Describe Phineas’ accident from your character’s point of view, draw a map of the route from the accident to the doctor’s office.
- Write an entry describing Phineas’ journey from New Hampshire to Boston with Dr. Cavendish.
- Create a map following Phineas’ journey (by boat) from New England to Chile, write three entries describing the dangerous journey.
- Draw the Stage Coach route that Phineas followed from Valparaiso to Santiago.
- Create a journal entry and map describing Phineas’ voyage from South America to San Francisco, CA.
- Create a map tracing the route Phineas’ skull took after being exhumed and transported to Harvard Medical School.
- Draw a map comparing Harvard and Yale in the year that Phineas’ skull arrived at its current resting place: Harvard Medical School.
- Write a final reflection on Phineas’ journey.
- Create your Phrenological self-portrait with a description of what makes you who you are.
