The class today went well.
Thank you for working so well together.
I will give you some vocabulary words to review from your word lists next class.
HOMEWORK:
-Please do chapter questions for chapter2
-Read chapter 3 for Tuesday.
HERE IS A SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 2
The description of Scout's first day allows Lee to provide a context for the events to follow by introducing some of the people and families of Maycomb County. By introducing Miss Caroline, who is like a foreigner in the school, Lee also reveals Maycomb culture to the reader. Maycomb county children are portrayed as a mainly poor, uneducated, rough, rural group ("most of them had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk"), in contrast to Miss Caroline, who wears makeup and "looked and smelled like a peppermint drop." The chapter helps show that a certain amount of ignorance prevails in Maycomb County. The school system, as represented by Miss Caroline, is well-intentioned, but also somewhat powerless to make a dent in patterns of behavior which are deeply ingrained in the town’s social fabric.
As seen in the first chapter, where a person's identity is greatly influenced by their family and its history, this chapter again shows that in Maycomb, a child's behavior can be explained simply by his family's last name, as when Scout explains to her teacher "he's a Cunningham." Atticus says that Mr. Cunningham "came from a set breed of men," which suggests that the entire Cunningham line shares the same values. In this case, they have pride: they do not like to take money they can't pay back, and they continue to live off the land in poverty rather than work for the government (in the WPA, FDR's Work Projects Administration). Thus, in Maycomb County, people belong to familial "breeds," which can determine a member's disposition or temperament. All the other children in the class understand this: growing up in this setting teaches children that people can behave a certain way simply because of the family or group that they come from.
The chapter also establishes that Scout is a very intelligent and precocious child who learned how to read through her natural instinct, sitting on Atticus's lap and following along in his book. She doesn't understand that she loves to read until her teacher tells her she can't read anymore: this shows that reading was a pleasure and a freedom she had taken for granted all her life until it is denied to her. The value of some freedoms can't be fully understood until a person is forced to part from them. Similarly, Scout and Jem will learn the full importance of justice later in the book through the trial of Tom Robinson, where justice is withheld and denied to a black man. The implication is that young people intrinsically expect certain human freedoms and have a natural sense for freedom and justice, which they only become aware of when the adults in society begin trying to take such freedoms away. Though Scout is young and impressionable, she becomes a spokesperson for her entire class, interacting with the adult teacher comfortably; this shows that though a child, she is more grown-up than some of her peers.
In this chapter, Lee also reveals how Scout looks to Jem for support and wisdom. Jem is sometimes wrong in his advice: he thinks that entailment is "having your tail in a crack" when it actually has to do with the way property is inherited, and he calls the new reading technique the "Dewey Decimal System" because he is confusing the library catalogue with the new educational theories of John Dewey. However, he gives his little sister support when she needs it even though he warns her not to tag along with him and his fifth-grade friends at school.
