The Great Gatsby: Character Map

This is a ready-to-teach unit built around a String Theory board. It is written in Understanding by Design (backward design) at the unit level, and the daily sequence follows gradual release (“I do / we do / you do”), the idiom most ELA classrooms already use.

Stage 1: Desired results

Enduring understandings

Students will understand that:

• Characters in a novel are defined by their relationships, not only by their descriptions. What a character wants, and who stands between them and it, is the engine of the plot.
• A symbol means nothing on its own. It means something because it is attached to a theme, a character, or a moment, and that attachment is an argument a reader has to defend.
• The order a story is told in is a deliberate choice, distinct from the order events happened in, and that gap is where an author controls sympathy and suspense.
• There is a difference between what a text states, what it implies, and what a reader infers. All three are legitimate; conflating them is not.

Essential questions

• Does Gatsby change over the course of the novel, or does only Nick’s view of him change?
• What does the novel suggest the American Dream costs, and who pays?
• Nick claims to reserve judgment. Should we believe him?
• Why does Fitzgerald tell us about 1917 in the middle of 1922?

Standards (Common Core ELA-Literacy)

• RL.11-12.1: cite strong and thorough textual evidence, including where the text leaves matters uncertain.
• RL.11-12.3: analyze how complex characters develop, interact, and advance the plot.
• RL.11-12.5: analyze how an author’s choices about structure and ordering contribute to meaning.
• W.11-12.9: draw evidence from literary texts to support analysis.
• SL.11-12.4 / SL.11-12.5: present findings clearly; make strategic use of digital media.

States outside Common Core: this unit maps cleanly onto TEKS English III (§110.38 c.4/c.5), Florida BEST ELA.11.R.1 and R.3, and Virginia SOL 11.4. Swap the codes in the header and the unit is unchanged.

Stage 2: Assessment evidence

Summative: the board itself

Each student (or pair) submits one String Theory board, which must contain at least the following:

Every claim on every card carries a Basis value: Stated in the text, Implied, or My interpretation. This field is the spine of the whole unit. It is not a formality: a board where everything is marked “Stated in the text” has not been read carefully, and a board where everything is “My interpretation” is not an analysis of this novel.

Every string carries a Significance note in one sentence. A string with no significance is decoration, and is graded as absent.

Every image or media item carries a License and an Attribution. This is a gate rather than a rubric row; see the ground rules section below.

Formative

• Day 1 exit ticket: each student submits one complete character card, with a correctly-assigned Basis on every field.
• Day 3 peer audit: students swap boards and flag any string missing a Significance, and any claim they believe is mis-classified on Basis. The disagreements are the lesson.
• Day 4 Timeline check: each student submits a screenshot of their Timeline view with the 1917 scenes correctly placed.

Rubric (4 points per row, 20 total)

Before you start: media, citation and AI ground rules

Set these rules before the first image goes onto a board, not after. Once thirty students have attached two hundred pictures, retrofitting attribution is not a lesson, it is a cleanup, and it will not happen. Twenty minutes of Day 0, or the tail of the period before the unit begins, is the whole cost.

Use the License dropdown as the mini-lesson

Every media item in String Theory carries License, Attribution and Source fields, and the License dropdown offers exactly seven values. Walk the list on the projector. Students are going to be choosing from it all unit, so teach the vocabulary in the words the tool uses.

The contrast worth teaching: one title, four different answers

The Great Gatsby is an unusually good vehicle for this, because the rights differ by artifact even though the title is the same.

• The 1925 novel text is public domain in the US. Quote it freely, reproduce it on handouts, put a passage on a card.
• The 1974 and 2013 films are fully in copyright. A still is All Rights Reserved, and “it’s for school” is an argument, not a permission.
• Most modern cover designs are separately copyrighted as artwork, independent of the text they wrap.
• A 1930s photograph of Fitzgerald depends entirely on the photographer, the publication and the year, and is often genuinely unresolvable. “I checked and could not determine this” is a legitimate research finding, and students should say so rather than guess. What it is not is a license. An unresolved photo is one the student either makes a documented Fair Use claim for or leaves off the board.

That contrast does more work than any abstract definition, because it shows students that “is it free?” is the wrong question. The right one is “free for what, and which thing are we talking about?”

Send students somewhere good. Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress digital collections, and period newspaper archives will cover nearly everything this unit needs, and each states a license on the item page. A short whitelist makes most of the Unknown problem disappear before it starts.

Fair use, said honestly

Fair use is a four-factor balancing test: the purpose of the use (is it transformative? is it educational?), the nature of the original, how much is used, and the effect on the market for it. Educational context helps under the first factor. It does not decide the question, and it is not a checkbox. Students should reach for Fair Use rarely and be able to say which factors they are relying on.

One thing that is specific to this tool and genuinely matters: a String Theory project can be published to a public link. A board seen by one class of thirty is a very different fair-use posture from the same board on the open web. Decide, as a class and in advance, whether boards get published at all. If any will be, hold those to a stricter standard: public domain and Creative Commons only, no fair-use claims. A project can publish the whole project or only the boards you pick, and what a published board hides never leaves the server, so a student can keep a working board private while a finished one is shared.

AI use: three separate questions, decided in writing

Do not let these collapse into a single “no AI” or “AI is fine.” They have different answers.

1. AI-generated images. A student generates a portrait of Gatsby rather than finding one. Decide whether this is permitted. If it is, require the item to be labeled as such: put “AI-generated, [tool], [date]” in Attribution and record the prompt in the description. For License, have students check what the tool’s terms actually say about output and set it accordingly rather than guessing; if they cannot establish that, the image falls under the same three-state rule as any other unresolved item and comes off the board. The issue here is provenance and honesty, which is a separate problem from copyright and does not go away just because the output is arguably unowned.
2. AI-generated analysis. A chatbot writes the Significance notes or assigns the Basis values. This one guts the assignment, and it is worth saying plainly rather than by implication: the Significance note and the Basis judgment are the thinking being assessed. Everything else on the card is transcription. A student who outsources those two fields has submitted someone else’s reading of the novel.
3. AI as a study aid. A student summarizes a chapter, defines a term, or checks whether a quotation says what they think it says. This is usually fine, and drawing the line explicitly is what makes the other two rules credible, because a blanket ban students consider unreasonable is a ban they route around silently.

About the app itself: the only AI feature a student can reach in String Theory is the Appearance dialog’s “Generate with AI” tab, and it does not do what the name might suggest. It hands you a prompt to run in your own AI tool and paste a result back, and what it produces is a skin: colors, fonts, density. It generates no images and writes no analysis. So any AI content in a student’s board arrived from outside the app, which means the policy needs to be about the tools students bring, not about anything they can click here.

Citation, and one limitation to disclose up front

Source-as-Object cards plus the per-media license and attribution fields feed the Sources view, which assembles a bibliography as a by-product of building the board. That is the payoff, and it is worth showing students on Day 1 so they understand why the fields are not busywork.

Be straight with them about the limit: the Sources view is not MLA. It renders a readable one-line citation per source, not a standards-compliant MLA or APA entry; that formatting is deliberately deferred in the product. If your department requires MLA 9, students will reformat the list by hand, and they should hear that at the start of the unit rather than discover it the night before it is due.

Make attribution a gate, not a rubric row

Any board submitted with an attached media item marked Unknown, or with a blank Attribution, is returned unmarked rather than marked down. Attribution is a condition of submission in the same way a name at the top of a paper is. Shaving two points teaches that credit is optional and cheap; returning the work teaches that it is not.

The gate is not a trap, because there is always a way through it. By the deadline every attached image is in one of three states: its license was determined, or the student is making a Fair Use claim they can defend on the factors, or the image is not on the board. Research that ends in “I could not determine the rights to this photograph” is a real and creditable finding. It is simply a finding recorded on the card, not a license, and it resolves to the third option. Students never have to choose between honesty and submitting.

Stage 3: Learning plan

Day 1: Characters and wants (I do)

Model one card start to finish on the projector. Build Nick Carraway with the class: Role = Narrator, Characterization = Round, dynamic (or argue for static; that is a real debate and worth having on Day 5), What they want, and a Development note.

Then do the Basis move explicitly. “Nick is from Minnesota” is Stated in the text. “Nick is drawn to Gatsby despite disapproving of him” is Implied. “Nick is in love with Gatsby” is My interpretation: a defensible one, with a body of criticism behind it. The field exists so a student can make that claim honestly rather than smuggling it in as fact.

Students: build Gatsby and Daisy independently. The exit ticket is one completed card.

Day 2: Strings (we do)

Introduce the string as an argument, not a line. Build the central triangle together (Gatsby loves Daisy, Daisy family_of Tom, Tom rivals_with Gatsby) and fill the Significance on each one as a class, out loud.

Then release: students add Jordan, Myrtle, George, Meyer Wolfshiem, Owl Eyes, and connect them. Push on precision. knows is almost always the wrong string; admires, wants, betrays, works_for, foil_of say something. Ask each student to justify one foil_of string in particular: Gatsby and Tom, or Nick and Gatsby, or Myrtle and Daisy.

Discussion prompt: Which character has the most strings? Is that the same as the most important character? Nick usually wins on count and is arguably not the answer.

Day 3: Symbols and themes (you do, with audit)

Students create three Theme cards (the American Dream, class and old versus new money, and the past) and four Object / Symbol cards: the green light, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, the Valley of Ashes, and one of their own choosing. Gatsby’s shirts and the stopped mantel clock in Chapter 5 are strong picks.

The rule that makes this hard: every symbol must be strung to a theme with symbolizes, develops or embodies, and the Significance note must say how, in one sentence, without using the word “represents.”

Reiterate the media rules today. This is the period when image use spikes, since symbols invite pictures in a way character cards do not. Restate the License and Attribution requirement before students start hunting, and remind them that anything they cannot license honestly can simply be described in words instead. A symbol card needs an argument, not a photograph.

Second half of the period is the peer audit. Swap boards, flag missing significance notes and disputed Basis values, and flag any media item still sitting on Unknown. Give the last ten minutes to defending flagged claims to the person who flagged them.

Day 4: Two orders (the structural move)

This is the day that is hard to teach without the tool, and it is the reason the unit exists.

Students have been filling in Where in the text (chapter and page) and When (in the story’s world) (the date the event actually happened) on each Scene card. Now switch to the Timeline view.

The board reorders itself by story-world date, and Gatsby and Daisy’s 1917 courtship in Louisville (which the reader meets in Chapter 4, secondhand, from Jordan) jumps to the front, before the novel’s own opening. Gatsby’s boyhood as James Gatz jumps earlier still, though the reader is not told about it until Chapter 6.

Ask: Fitzgerald had the option to tell this in order. He didn’t. What does the reader gain by meeting Gatsby as a rumor first and only later learning where he came from? What would the novel lose if Chapter 6 were Chapter 1?

Assign: each student adds a foreshadows string from an earlier scene to a later one and defends it in the Significance field.

Day 5: Presentation and seminar

Students give four-minute board walkthroughs in small groups, each answering one essential question with their board as the visual. Close with a whole-class Socratic seminar on whichever question drew the most disagreement, usually “does Gatsby change?”

Written follow-up (homework): students write one analytical paragraph (claim, evidence and reasoning) drawn from a single string on their board. The Significance note is the rough draft of the topic sentence, which is the point.

Supplement: the portrait problem (optional, and the best argument for AI in this unit)

Fitzgerald describes his characters unevenly, and the unevenness is not random. This activity turns that into the lesson.

What the text actually gives you

Before students invent anything, they need to know exactly what they have been given. Have them find these themselves; the table is the answer key, not the handout.

That table is itself a discussion. Three questions fall straight out of it:

• Why is the man Nick dislikes most the man he sees most clearly?
• Why does Fitzgerald give us Daisy’s voice where he would give another character a face, and what does it mean that the one physical detail he finally supplies belongs to Gatsby’s memory instead of Nick’s observation?
• What happens to a first-person narrator who is never described? Who does the reader put in that empty space?

The activity

1. Write the description first, from the text. Each student takes a character and writes a physical description in prose, as detailed as they like, but every sentence has to be defensible. Beside each sentence they mark the same Basis value the board uses: Stated in the text (Tom’s hard mouth), Implied (Gatsby’s build, from five years of physical labor and a soldier’s fitness), or My interpretation (anything they are supplying themselves).
2. Generate the portrait from their own words. If AI images are permitted (see the ground rules above; the school’s policy is the gate, not this plan), the student’s description becomes the prompt, and the tool renders it.
3. The prompt goes in the media item’s Description field, and the attribution reads “AI-Generated Image · [tool], [date].” This is not bookkeeping: the prompt is the student’s reading, written down. A grader can see exactly which sentences came from the novel and which the student supplied, and the image is the evidence of what those choices produce.
4. Compare across the room. Put four students’ Daisys on the projector side by side. They will not match, and the interesting question is why, traced back through the prompts to the text. A class where every Gatsby looks the same has stopped reading and started remembering the film.

Why this works when a “draw the character” exercise usually doesn’t

The gap between what a text states and what a reader supplies is the hardest thing to teach in this unit, because it is invisible in ordinary writing: a student’s essay reads the same whether the detail came from page 12 or from their own head. Generating an image makes the invisible part visible and specific: the student must decide Daisy’s hair color, and the novel will only help them once, late, and in someone else’s memory. The Basis field they have been using all week suddenly has teeth, because a wrong guess produces a picture that is visibly not in the book.

It is also the rare AI use that adds work rather than removing it. The thinking (the description, the sourcing, the defense) all happens before the tool is touched, and the tool cannot do any of it for them.

Ground rules specific to this activity

• Grade the description, not the image. The rubric row is the prose and its Basis marks. Image quality is a function of the tool and belongs nowhere in the grade.
• Check the output against a real person. Generators converge on famous faces, especially for “handsome man in a 1920s suit.” If a portrait comes out recognizably as a particular actor, regenerate it. (This is not hypothetical: it happened while building the demo board, and the fix was one more generation.) A likeness of a real person is a problem the “it’s AI” label does not solve.
• Keep descriptions to what the text supports. Several of these characters are described in physical terms by a narrator with opinions; students should be reproducing Fitzgerald’s emphasis, not inventing their own.
• The no-AI version is the same lesson. Skip step 2 entirely: students exchange descriptions and sketch, or simply read them aloud and compare. Steps 1, 3 and 4 carry the learning; the image is the vivid part, not the necessary part.

Differentiation and accommodations

• Scaffolded entry: provide a partially-built board with the eight character cards named but empty. Students fill fields rather than deciding who matters, which removes the blank-page problem without removing the thinking.
• Extension for advanced students: require a second Basis pass in which the student finds one claim in a peer’s board that the text actively undercuts. Alternatively, have them build the same map for the 1974 or 2013 film and string the differences with based_on.
• IEP / 504: the board is a visual-spatial alternative to the traditional character essay and often works better for students with dysgraphia or processing-speed accommodations. Reduce the card minimums rather than the field requirements; depth on six cards beats thinness on twenty-five.
• ELL: the Pin caption is one short phrase, which makes it a manageable writing target compared with a paragraph. Permit first-language notes in Details, and accept quoted evidence without paraphrase.
• Absent students: the board persists and syncs, so a returning student picks up their own board rather than reconstructing a poster.

Materials

To run the unit you will need:

• The novel, any edition, and a class set of sticky flags for evidence-hunting on paper.
• One String Theory project per student or pair, on the Literary Analysis template pack.
• A projector for Days 1, 2 and 4.
• A printed rubric.
• A worked exemplar: the Great Gatsby demo project in String Theory, a two-board build (character web + themes/evidence) with every claim carrying a Basis value and every passage its chapter. It is useful on Day 1 to show what “finished” looks like, and on Day 5 as the thing a class critique can disagree with. It is a model, not an answer key: its readings are arguable and students should be invited to argue with them.
• A one-page handout of the media rules, including the approved image-source whitelist and the AI policy. Hand it out on Day 0 and put it on the wall. A rule that lives only in a spoken announcement is a rule half the class will not have heard.

Notes for the teacher

Setup. Create the project, choose the Literary Analysis pack, and the vocabulary follows: cards read Character, Setting, Object / Symbol, Scene / Plot point, and Theme / Device rather than the generic Person / Place / Object / Event / Concept. Nothing needs configuring.

Pin caption is not a name field. When set, it replaces the entity’s name on the card face, so it should say why the card matters: “the man who wants a rerun of 1917,” not “Jay Gatsby.” Nothing enforces a length, but anything past roughly fifty characters stops fitting a card cleanly. Students consistently need telling this twice.

Let the Basis argument happen. The three values will produce disagreement in the peer audit, and that disagreement is the most valuable ten minutes in the unit. Resist arbitrating it.

On classroom accounts: each student needs their own workspace, and the free plan allows two projects and 250 entities per workspace, which is comfortably more than this unit needs. Publishing is per project and can be narrowed to the boards you pick; see the ground rules above for why that matters to the publishing decision as well as to collection.

The media rules are not an add-on. Media Literacy sits inside the standards this unit already claims, and the License field is a better vehicle for it than a standalone lesson, because students meet the question at the moment they have an actual image in hand and a reason to want it. Teach it here and you are not spending the period on it, you are spending four minutes at three points in the week.