Chapter+2

Chapter 2: > > Teacher: Miss Caroline Fischer- Age 21, auburn hair, smells like peppermint, from Alabama, introduced the Dewey Decimal System, dislikes that Atticus taught Scout to read, tells her not to learn from him, also dislikes that Scout was taught to write, cares about Walter when he does not have lunch, when Scout speaks out against the teacher she gets punished with lashes from the ruler on her hands. > Miss Blount- the sixth grade teacher in the room next door > > Classmates: Walter Cunningham- lives on a farm, family is very poor, does not take what he can't pay back, his family has used the help of Atticus and payed him back in food
 * Describe the classroom and classmates

 In the novel __To Kill a Mockingbird__, the author, Harper Lee, includes many signs that indicate the hard economic times of the Great Depression. There were several examples of these signs in Chapter 2. In this chapter, the narrator, Scout, describes her first day in school. In the classroom, many examples of poverty are clearly evident to the reader.
 * Describe and analyze Walter Cunningham and his family
 * Cunningham family does not take anything they cannot pay back. They are quite poor but they are just able to get the essentials although Walter’s face is a give-away to hookworm. He does not own one pair of shoes or a nice shirt for the first day of school. Scout knows Walter Cunningham’s background information because his father was one of Atticus’ patients last winter. He was unable to pay him with money, so throughout the year he paid with stove wood, hickory nuts, smilax, holly, turnip greens, and other items like those. Because the Cunninghams are farmers, the Depression hit them the hardest.
 * Include signs of hard economic times (throughout the whole chapter)

The teacher, Miss Caroline, young and inexperienced, asks the students to take their lunches out. Upon looking around the room, she notices that one of the boys, Walter Cunningham, does not have anything on his desk. She tries to give him money to buy food, but he refuses. Not understanding his family’s financial standing, she becomes impatient with him. Scout tries to explain to her that being a Cunningham, one of the poorer families in town, Walter will not accept the money from her because he know that he won’t be able to pay her back. The only way in which he will be able to pay her back is in the form of crops, however, Miss Caroline would probably not find much use out of these.

Scout attempts to explain to the teacher that the Cunninghams, a farming family, were one of the families that got hit the hardest during the economic crisis. Harper Lee’s descriptions and vivid details very affectively portrayed the poverty during the Great Depression. >> • The first is when Atticus tells Scout: “The Cunninghams are country folk, farmers, and the crash hit them the hardest” (Lee, 21). Atticus is referring to when the stock market crashed in 1929, which piloted the Great Depression. This specific time period is when the story takes place. >> • Another is the WPA, which Atticus also refers to. It was the Works Progress Administration and it was part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to aid the citizens in the Great Depression.
 * Analyze the allusions on page 21
 * On page 21 in To Kill a Mockingbird, there are important allusions that set the environment for the story.