The Phantom Tollbooth

Title: The Phantom Tollbooth

Author: Norton Juster

Illustrator: Jules Feiffer

Grade Level: 5-8

NCTM Content Standards: Geometry, numbers/operations, measurement

Summary: The Phantom Tollbooth tells the story of Milo, a lethargic young boy who chances to discover a magical tollbooth. Traveling through the booth, he finds himself in a fantasy world in the midst of a civil war between lovers of words (led by King Azaz) and lovers of numbers (led by the great Mathemagician). Accompanied by his watchdog friend Tock and the cranky Humbug, Milo journeys through the magical realms of sight, sound, and context in a quest to return the Princesses Rhyme and Reason to the land and restore peace once and for all. Facing “punny” demons, he discovers the power of knowledge and learns more about numbers and words than he ever thought important.

Uses: The Phantom Tollbooth relies heavily on speech in both the sections on words and the sections on numbers. When Milo first arrives in Digitopolis, the land of numbers, he encounters a talking Dodecahedron (who uses each of his faces to convey a different emotion) who points out the use of mathematical language in everyday speech, referencing phrases such as “high hopes” and “narrow escapes” and “wide world.” A possible activity that could employ both themes of the world in The Phantom Tollbooth could ask students to search for everyday clichés that involve mathematical vocabulary. This would connect mathematics to the world outside of school. It might also be fun for students to create characters out of geometric shapes, determining how many emotions each shape can convey, based on the number of faces it has, just like the Dodecahedron.

Another interesting episode involves Milo’s encounter with 0.58 boy. The boy explains that the average family has 2.58 children and that he is the 0.58 in his family. Milo objects that averages aren’t real, but in fact, are imaginary. The 0.58 boy argues that averages are very useful at times. Students can find such averages and statistics in the world and discuss what it would mean to be 0.58 of a person, and such.

Although not an activity, an important point of the story is that the Mathemagician’s magic wand is actually a pencil. This idea can be brought up repeatedly from time to time, having the students use their own pencils to perform magic. For example, they can make numbers disappear with the equation 4+5-9 which equals zero, an “invisible” number.