To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 2

Narration Prompt

Retell chapter two as the novel's diagnosis of a failed institutional encounter: a young teacher trained in one progressive system arriving inside a county whose own working knowledge she cannot read, and the small disasters of a single morning — the cat story, the alphabet, the refused quarter, the ruler, the corner.

Discussion Questions

1. Harper Lee loads a 1933 schoolroom with a seventy-two-year-old memory — Winston County's secession from Alabama in 1861 — and makes that memory instantly relevant to the class's judgment of Miss Caroline — what is the author arguing, through this detail, about the persistence of Southern historical identity and its cost?
2. Scout is punished for correctly identifying Walter Cunningham as a Cunningham and for reporting the family's refusal to take anything they cannot pay back — argue whether Harper Lee is presenting this punishment as Miss Caroline's failing, as the structural hostility of institutional authority toward local epistemology, or as an early model of the way Maycomb will later punish truth-tellers at the Tom Robinson trial.

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide