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Copywork
About This Passage
Selected for rhetorical sophistication (Atticus deliberately understates the ethical weight of his teaching by calling it a 'trick,' a word that implies low stakes, while delivering a doctrine that the entire novel will treat as the foundation of moral life), thematic weight (the metaphor of climbing into another person's skin is the novel's most-quoted line because it compresses an entire ethical philosophy into an image a child can remember), and syntactic complexity (the cumulative dependent clauses stack toward the climactic 'climb into his skin and walk around in it,' so the sentence enacts the slow, deliberate effort it describes).
First of all, he said, if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of v...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize this chapter, then explain what you think the author most wanted the reader to notice or feel. What techniques did the author use?
Discussion Questions
- Atticus delivers the central ethical teaching of the entire novel — the climb-into-his-skin principle — in deliberately understated language. He calls it 'a simple trick,' he speaks calmly, and he attaches it to a small, immediate problem (getting along with Miss Caroline). What is Lee accomplishing by having her novel's most important moral principle delivered without ceremony? Consider an alternative version in which Atticus speaks with formal solemnity. How would the meaning of the principle change?
- Calpurnia's scolding of Scout in the kitchen — 'Don't matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this house's yo' comp'ny' — is one of the most morally serious moments of the chapter, and it comes from a Black servant correcting her employer's white child. Lee places this moment carefully: Calpurnia is not Scout's mother, and Scout's mother is dead, so Calpurnia occupies a role Lee will keep returning to throughout the novel. What is Lee doing by placing the chapter's first major moral lesson in Calpurnia's mouth rather than Atticus's? And what is she suggesting about who actually does the daily moral instruction in the Finch household?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
An agreement reached through mutual concession, in which each party accepts less than originally desired in order to settle a dispute
Item 2
The expression or condition of moral disapproval, particularly when communicated by a community
Item 3
Grossly unjust or wicked acts; behavior that violates basic standards of fairness
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Critical Thinking
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