Either route is possible, but according to a museum curator with expertise on train travel, the eastern seaboard route was more likely. Students put themselves in Annie Sullivan's shoes during the trip by writing letters and by estimating the time and expense of travel. Additionally, using the Bell papers, students can make connections between Alexander Graham Bell, whom they likely know as the inventor of the telephone, and the main character, with whom they may not be familiar, thus making the play more accessible and believable. The protagonist, an African-American Baptist, learns to know himself and others better through his contact with several German Catholic nuns and a community of Hispanic Americans, who encourage and help him to build an adobe Catholic chapel. Students can search the Rael collection for texts of Hispanic religious hymns to deepen their understanding of the faith of the Hispanic population in the book.
Connections also exist for extending the lesson into Spanish and music classes, as well.
Students will search and select photographs that could be used as real-life illustrations of characters or scenes in the novel or that evoke the themes of the story. Depending on the availability of Internet access, this unit can be approached in two ways. Once students have printed several images, they can use them to create collages, captioning the photos with appropriate quotations from the novel. In the absence of class Internet access, the teacher can search and print a selection of photos for students to match with characters, situations, and settings. As we developed our original lesson plans for the 1998 American Memory Institute, we were delighted to see how many opportunities there were for connecting already existing teaching units to the collections.