To Kill a Mockingbird
Guided Notes
TOPICS
Plot, Conflict, Setting, Foreshadowing, Flashback, Symbols, Tone,
Character, Theme, Author’s Purpose, Point of View,
Author’s Perspective, Main Idea, Inference, Thesis Essay,
Quote Analysis, Cause and Effect, Figurative Language
Name: ______
Teacher: ______
CHAPTER 1
TOPIC / WHO / WHATMAIN IDEA
*** Always provide examples from the text to support your answer. ***
1. We meet a lot of people in the first chapter. Fill out the following organizer to determine who these people are. (Analyze Character)
Character / Details/Actions / CharacterizationScout / 1.
2.
Jem / 1.
2.
Dill / 1.
2.
Calpurnia / 1.
2.
Miss Stephanie Crawford / 1.
2.
Boo Radley / 1.
2.
2. Scout describes the setting of the town in detail. Briefly explain Maycomb below. (Identify Setting)
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3. Below are two quotes that give Maycomb its own characterization. Analyze the quotes and describe what is revealed to the reader. (Analyze Setting)
Quote / AnalysisA day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of ______County
Of all days Sunday was the day for formal afternoon visiting: ladies wore corsets, men wore coats, children wore shoes
4. Who is the narrator of To Kill A Mockingbird? ______
5. As our narrator, how might she affect our reading of the story? What are potential biases, disadvantages, or advantages to her narrative? (Analyze POV) ______
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6. Who is Boo Radley to Scout and Jem? How do the children and the community shape his identity for him? (Character, Analyze POV) ______
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7. The Radley house stands out against Maycomb and the community. What is different? What could the house potentially represent? (Analyze Setting, Analyze Theme, Analyze Symbol) ______
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8. Interpret the following figurative language:
Text / Effectiveness“Jem figured that Mr. Radley kept him chained to the bed most of the time. Atticus said no, it wasn’t that sort of thing, that there were other ways of making people into ghosts.”
CHAPTER 2
TOPIC / WHO / WHATMAIN IDEA
*** Always provide examples from the text to support your answer. ***
1. What does the setting at school teach us about the town and its people? (Analyze Setting) ______
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2. Characterize Miss Caroline. Is she a good teacher or not? Explain your answer.
Actions/Details about Miss Caroline / What it reveals / Is she a good teacher?3. How is Scout different from her classmates – what sticks out about her identity? What does that reveal about her and her situation? (Analyze Character, Compare and Contrast) ______
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4. At school, we see two things that give characters power. What gives characters power and how does this compare with today? (Analyze Conflict) ______
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5. Interpret the following figurative language:
Text / Effectiveness“Walter looked as if he had been raised on fish food…”
CHAPTER 3
TOPIC / WHO / WHATMAIN IDEA
*** Always provide examples from the text to support your answer. ***
1. Miss Caroline’s status as an outsider is the cause of several conflicts. Explain how her ignorance of Maycomb ways causes these conflicts. (Analyze Conflict) ______
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2. What did Scout say on the first page about the Ewell’s? Characterize Burris and explain how his identity might foreshadow the identity of the family and conflict to come. (Analyze Character, Foreshadowing)
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3. What is Burris’s attitude toward school?
Emotion Words/Situation / Tone/Attitude4. Atticus teaches Scout an important lesson after her first day of school? What is that lesson? Provide the actual quote to support. (Analyze Theme) ______
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5. Maycomb is built on a community that agrees on what is right and what is wrong. Who is the exception to that community according to Atticus? What conflict results from the community vs. individual situation? (Analyze Theme and Conflict) ______
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CHAPTER 4
TOPIC / WHO / WHATMAIN IDEA
*** Always provide examples from the text to support your answer. ***
1. What do Scout and Jem find in the knot-hole? Who do you think is putting the items there? ______
______
2. What deeper meaning could these items have? (Analyze Symbol)
Symbol / Deeper Meaning/Interpretation3. Describe how Scout’s description of her first find is effective in conveying her motivations.
Text / Effectiveness“Some tinfoil was sticking in a knot-hold just above my eye level, winking at me in the afternoon sun.”
4. What internal conflict is developing for Scout? What is she fighting against in terms of her identity? Find 2 quotes to support. ______
______
1.2.
5. Who do you think was laughing in the house during the tire incident? Why do you think Scout keeps that information to herself? (Analyze POV, Inference) ______
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CHAPTER 5
TOPIC / WHO / WHATMAIN IDEA
*** Always provide examples from the text to support your answer. ***
1. Characterize Miss Maudie. Use her actions, words, and Scout descriptions. (Analyze Character)
Miss Maudie / 1.2.
3. / Characterization
2. What is a foot-washing Baptist according to Miss Maudie? What do they believe? (Comprehension)
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3. Interpret the following quote: “sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of [another].” (Interpretation, Analyze Theme) ______
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4. Why do you think it’s important to Scout and Miss Maudie that Atticus acts the same at home as he does in public? What does it say about Atticus’s morals vs. community morals? Can we do this? (Inference, Analyze Theme) ______
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5. How does Scout’s internal conflict affect her actions in this chapter? (Analyze Conflict)
Conflict / Effects on Scout / Potential Changes to Scout LaterClose Reading
Symbols: ______Main idea
? Questions, vocabulary
∞ Connection between TKAM and article
THE 1930s: EDUCATION: OVERVIEW
Ideals and Realities
Long before the 1930s the public school was a symbol of American democracy. In many ways it represented the promise of America: a place where hard work and achievement were rewarded, where brilliance was mined from the ore of raw talent—a necessary starting point on the road to success. Pedagogues from Thomas Jefferson to John Dewey argued that the future of the school and the future of democracy were one, that the school was the only nonauthoritarian institution capable of instilling the self-discipline necessary for a self-governing nation. The distance between the American ideal of school and the reality of American schools in the 1930s, however, was striking. Lip service for education was freely available, but financial support for schools and good salaries for teachers went begging. A financially pressed public prioritized its limited resources, and the schools lost out. Early in the decade a blue-ribbon panel of the National Economic League issued a list of "Paramount Problems of the United States"; in 1930 the condition of education was fourteenth among their concerns; in 1931 it was twenty-fourth and in 1932 thirty-second. During the Depression most Americans decided they could not afford their love affair with the school.
The Bottom Line
The goals and ideals of education in the 1930s were in sharp conflict with the economic bottom line, as businessmen repeatedly pointed out. In the 1910s and 1920s American business had been one of the foremost champions of public education, especially of the high school, which was busy training at taxpayer expense the stenographers, secretaries, and clerks of the future. In the 1920s businessmen had generously loaned money for new school buildings and reaped handsome profits as building contractors and school provisioners. During the Depression, however, businessmen had a change of heart. Schools needed tax dollars to survive; businesses needed tax breaks to pay their debts. C. Weston Bailey, president of the National Board of Fire Underwriters, spoke for many when he complained of "exorbitant taxes and bureaucracy" in education and demanded a "prompt stopping of this riot of waste." Businessmen's groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Committee for Economy in Government, and the National Economic League argued that Americans could no longer afford universal public education. The most extreme among them wanted the schools closed, while the moderates argued that the schools should restrict their instruction to trade skills and job training. They also wanted their school loans paid back, and they wanted school boards to maintain their lucrative provisioning contracts. In Chicago businessmen had their way: the school board fired fourteen hundred teachers, cut the salaries and increased the teaching loads of the remainder, and repaid their building debts to businessmen—even as they retained provisioning contracts, and businessmen received federal bailouts. Georgia and Alabama closed schools, leaving thousands of children without access to formal education. Iowa lowered teachers' salaries 30 percent, to forty dollars a month. By 1933 there were two hundred thousand unemployed teachers; 2.2 million children were out of school; and two thousand rural schools in twenty-four states failed to open. Whatever transcendent values the school had in the American imagination, they were not sufficient to protect education from the Depression.
Class Barriers
Success in education meant graduation from college. Graduation from college meant access to high-wage jobs and wealth. But college was not open to many. Admission requirements retained from the nineteenth century often stressed a knowledge of archaic languages, such as Latin or Greek, or mastery of subjects such as algebra, not taught in all public schools. The children of wealthy businessmen, trained in private, expensive college-preparatory academies, were well prepared for college-admission tests. Children attending public high schools often were not. Businessmen argued that financing academic training in the high schools was a waste of money: children from working-class, immigrant backgrounds were born for manual labor, and their high-school education should be in metalworking, not Latin. That a child educated in metalworking would be unable to pass an examination in Latin was obvious. Less obvious was the fact that in this manner gifted children from impoverished backgrounds would be prevented from competing with less-talented children from wealthy backgrounds.
Racial Barriers
The manner in which education served to reinforce the economic status quo was illustrated perfectly in the education of African Americans. American education was racially segregated in the 1930s precisely because of the white presumption that blacks were inherently incapable of learning at an advanced level. Segregating white schoolchildren from black schoolchildren meant that white pupils presumably would not be "held back" in the classroom by less-capable black pupils. Black schools, especially in the South, were thus underfunded and rudimentary. There were a mere handful of black high schools throughout the South. Two hundred thirty southern counties did not have a single high school for black students in 1932—even though every one of these counties possessed a high school for whites. In sixteen states there was not a single state-supported black institution that offered graduate or professional programs. Northern white philanthropists, sometimes explicitly acknowledging that their goal was to prevent "competition between the races," often insisted that their charity be used to build black "industrial schools/' training African Americans for manual labor. Only African Americans and some white progressive educators dissented from the mainstream assumption that tax money spent on black education was a waste of money. Black communities throughout the country built schools for themselves and hired instructors for the most difficult subjects. Black academics such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Horace Mann Bond, and E, Franklin Frazier attacked intelligence testing and educational discrimination that validated the status quo. They were combating years of neglect and racism. In 1930, 15 percent of rural adult African Americans had no formal schooling, and 48 percent had never gone beyond the fifth grade. White school boards paid white teachers an average annual salary of $833; black teachers, who had larger teaching loads, were paid only $510. Ironically, the Depression improved the situation of black education in many ways. In northern schools, school boards began to abolish segregated education as a way of saving money; in the South educators fearful of the possible consequences of unschooled, unemployed youths succeeded in getting school districts to build high schools for blacks—if for no other reason than to keep them off the streets. Thanks to such programs and to literacy campaigns mounted by New Deal agencies such as the National Youth Administration (NYA), by 1940 five hundred thousand illiterate blacks had been taught to read and write. The number of African Americans attending high school doubled; the number of high-school graduates tripled; and the percentage of blacks attending school became equal to that of whites.
Progressive Education
Segregation, of course, validated its own racial premises: substandard education was given to blacks because they were presumed to be incapable of intellectual achievement; substandard education then kept blacks from achieving academic success, Progressive educators sought to break this vicious circle of educational failure by changing the criteria for educational success for both poor blacks and poor whites. Progressives argued that colleges should restructure their curricula and admissions requirements to reflect the modern, scientific, multicultural character of American society. They argued that requirements tied to the older collegiate traditions of "gentlemanly education," such as Latin and the classics, ought to be deemphasized in favor of the sciences. In 1934 the Progressive Education Association began a large, expensive experiment, an eight-year study designed to convince colleges to modernize their curricula, which they did after World War II. Progressives also advocated restructuring primary-and secondary-school courses of study, in general favoring a broader evaluation of scholastic performance than strict academic excellence. Often progressives disagreed about how this broadening of education was to take place, but in general they sought an expansion of education to everyone, a leveling of differences in the quality of education provided, and the creation of real opportunities for impoverished students.
Complete this chart, comparing/contrasting education in the 1930’s to today.
Education / 1930s / TodayIdeas and Realities
The Bottom Line
Class Barriers
Racial Barriers
Chapters 6-10 Guided Notes
Name: ______
Teacher: ______
All Journals must be AT LEAST 5 SENTENCES.
Topic Sentence
3-5 supporting details
Concluding Sentence
Journal #1:
Describe a time that you have done something even though others were against it. Why did you go through with this action if nobody supported you? What was the outcome of your decision?
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Journal #2:
Describe a time that you (or someone you know) got into trouble for something you (or they) did not do. How did you handle the situation? If you could do it all over again, would you change things? Explain.
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CHAPTER 6
TOPIC / WHO / WHATMAIN IDEA
*** Always provide examples from the text to support your answer. ***
1. Describe the effects of the description of the back of the Radley house. (Analyze Setting)
Description/Details / Effectiveness / Comparison to Neighbors2. Jem faces many conflicts in this chapter. What are the conflicts, and which conflict is the biggest in his mind? Why? (Analyze Conflict) ______
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3. What literary devices build suspense in this chapter and the children’s desire to communicate with Boo?
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CHAPTER 7
TOPIC / WHO / WHATMAIN IDEA
*** Always provide examples from the text to support your answer. ***
1. Scout takes the advice of her father at the beginning of the chapter. What is that advice, and what does it reveal about her character that she follows it? (Character, Theme) ______
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2. Who do you think fixed Jem’s pants? Provide 2 details from the text to support your answer. (Inference)
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Detail 1:Detail 2:
3. Scout describes the settings in Alabama. What does she describe? What might a change in setting signify? (Analyze Foreshadowing) ______
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4. What might the items Jem and Scout find in the tree symbolize? (Analyze Symbol)
Symbol / Deeper Meaning/Interpretation5. Why do you think Mr. Radley filled the knothole with cement? Describe how his POV might affect his actions. (Inference, Analyze POV) ______
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6. How have Scout and Jem matured in their attitude toward Boo Radley? What does this say about their character? (Analyze Character, POV) ______
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CHAPTER 8
TOPIC / WHO / WHATMAIN IDEA
*** Always provide examples from the text to support your answer. ***
1. How does the setting change in the beginning of the chapter? How does this change affect the neighborhood?
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2. What main conflict is faced in this chapter? What happens as a result of this conflict? ______
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3. Why do you think Boo “joined” the community that night? What was his purpose and what does it say about his character? How might our views of his identity have changed? (Analyze Character, Motivation ______
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CHAPTER 9
TOPIC / WHO / WHATMAIN IDEA
*** Always provide examples from the text to support your answer. ***
1. Why is Atticus defending Tom Robinson and what does that say about his character? (Analyze Motivation)
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2. Atticus tells Scout that he’ll be fighting friends, but they’ll remain friends when it’s over. Do you think that’s possible? Connect this situation to the theme of individual morality vs. community morality. (Theme)