Mrs. B's Eccentric Book Reports: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Thirty years ago I became an English teacher because I love to read and I love to share books and ideas. When someone next to me on the bus is reading, I want to see what they're reading, and I want to know what they think about it. If you invite me to your home, I’ll scope out your bookshelves. I want to share good books with people, and I want to share the meaning, ideas, and feelings that books convey.

Being an English teacher was the perfect job for me—right?

WRONG! On so many levels it was a bad fit, though I did it with reasonable success for many years. Dissecting, analyzing, labeling, memorizing, and testing are a far cry from the cozy coffee shop or rowdy bar discussions I enjoyed. And don’t get me started on BOOK REPORTS…

I want to share books (and sometimes movies, short stories, paintings, and possibly other media) that have impacted my life, made me think, laugh, and cry. And I want to know what you think, too. So please respond to the silly polls and make comments if you want to.

Yes, this is a monetized site, so I can’t help but hope you’ll buy the items I recommend, but I also offer a link to my wonderful local library, the Seattle Public Library. If you want your local library linked, tell me and I’ll post it in addition. In these difficult times, it’s a wonderful thing that the world’s literary treasures are free (for three weeks, anyway).

I deliberately have no plan, order, or logical arrangement, so with no further ado, I’d like to introduce you to one of my favorite novels: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

This is usually the most lengthy and boring part of a traditional book report. I'm going to reduce the plot summary to one sentence:

A young girl grows up in the deep South during the Depression, learning about eccentric neighbors, racial prejudice, and the gray areas of morality, pretty much in that order.

I challenge you to submit your version of a one to three sentence summary of To Kill a Mockingbird in the Comments section below.

When I was in elementary school, we saw two movies every year. It was a big deal. We were ushered into the gym to sit on the floor facing the big screen pulled down over the stage. The lights dimmed, the reel-to-reel projector began clacking, the images began to flicker, and there we were--WATCHING A MOVIE AT SCHOOL. We saw Dumbo on the day before Christmas vacation and To Kill a Mockingbird on the last day of school. I loved both of them equally!

However, To Kill a Mockingbird stuck with me a while longer, and before I was out of sixth grade, I had read it several times; though, I must say, I skimmed or skipped parts of it I found boring or incomprehensible. As the years continued, I continued to read Mockingbird every few years and considered it one of my favorite books.

Twenty years ago, I got a job teaching eighth grade English, and, to my delight, one of the novels we read each year was To Kill a Mockingbird . The kids sometimes called it How to Kill a Mockingbird or Tequila Mockingbird . They were always apprehensive at the beginning because the print was smaller and the words were bigger than many of them were used to, although some of them had already read it. I always read aloud the first chapter stopping frequently for clarification to get them started.

When the history of Boo Radley was explained, I asked the students if during their childhoods (last year!) there had ever been a neighbor who was a bit strange, someone they were afraid of, someone they might even have tormented. At this point, the kids all had stories they wanted to tell. Sometimes we even had to continue the next day because so many were eager to tell their stories about the weird neighbor. However, the last couple of years that I taught the book, when I asked the same questions, the class would just stare at me blankly. It was the same when I asked about games they played with their friends, exploring places in the neighborhood, and anything to do with pretending . Though I'm glad kids don't seem to be tormenting reclusive neighbors, there just seems to be something missing from some of these children's early lives.

Though I grew up in a middle class community during the 50s and 60s, I had the same kind of childhood as Scout Finch, the narrator, did during the 1930s in the deep South. My friends and I were largely unsupervised, and we had loads of unstructured time away from adults. We played "Let's pretend" games frequently inspired by books. We lived in a place where we felt safe and were allowed to roam pretty freely. Adults were there if we needed them but had their own lives as we had ours. It was wonderful.

Though To Kill a Mockingbird is touted as a "Civil Rights" novel, important in promoting racial equality, I find it to be merely mediocre in that respect. Yeah, yeah, folks is folks, but the novel doesn't seem to promote the idea of trying to achieve equal rights, but rather just getting along and keeping the status quo. To Kill a Mockingbird is masterful as a coming of age story or bildungsroman (Guess who just learned a new word from Wikipedia?). We see through Scout's eyes and follow her journey from innocence to experience. Yes, she's only ten at the end of the novel, but she's worked out some moral issues that many adults never come to grips with.

So I started out reading To Kill a Mockingbird in sixth grade, interested only in the Boo Radley aspect. I taught the novel during the early 90's stressing the Civil Rights aspect, and now I've come full circle, back to Boo. After all, what is prejudice, really? And what kind of prejudice most affects lives? We think we know someone but we don't. We think because someone is of a certain race, or speaks a certain way, or wears certain clothing that we know him, but we don't. Atticus Finch, father of the narrator says, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view--until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." Well, I can't do that, but at least I can withhold judgment until I have some first-hand knowledge.

Since I'm rambling inanely, I'd like to share two interesting things that happened in my classroom while I was teaching Mockingbird . I taught this book in a very upper class, very white school. It was kind of a school tradition to act out the trial of Tom Robinson (the black man unjustly accused of rape) from the book. This had been done for many years, and the students knew it was coming as we got closer to the trial. One year we had only one black student, A.J., in the whole school, and he was in my first period class. I also had a student, Josh, with a damaged and mostly useless arm, in my first period class. Yes, his LEFT arm. (If you've read the book, you know how important that is.) My plan was to make Josh the judge, a very coveted part because one got to sit behind the podium. I was going to have a private talk with A.J. and make him the prosecutor. Before I could execute my plan, Josh and A.J. got into an argument

"I'm gonna be Tom Robinson!"

No, I'm gonna be Tom Robinson!"

"Why should you get to be Tom?" yells A.J.

"Duh," yells Josh, pointing to his arm. "Why should YOU get to be Tom?"

"Duh," yells A.J., pointing to his arm.

So what would you do? I gave Josh the part of Tom Robinson and followed my original plan of making A.J. the prosecutor, with some additional coaching. It worked out great, although both were still mad at each other because A.J. was such a good, convincing prosecutor, Josh took it personally.

The second incident involves a student named Joel, who although very intelligent, could not read. I've met several people over the years who just aren't wired for reading, and Joel was one of them. This was an inclusion class ( special education and regular education students) I was team-teaching with my good friend Pam, a special education teacher. Joel was having so many difficulties in another class than Pam removed him from that class, and he was in our class twice in a row. It sounds like a strange thing to do, but it worked for Joel, and he was happy in the situation and doing very well. His only problem was that he had to hear anything read aloud to the class twice, and he didn't like that. One day I had read aloud a whole chapter of Mockingbird . When the first class left Joel informed me that he was tired of hearing me read and that he would read the chapter to the next class. Knowing that he couldn't read AT ALL, I tried to talk him out of it, but he was adamant. Pam and I decided to go with it.

Class began and I announced that Joel would be reading today. I went and sat in the back of the room at my desk. When the kids read aloud, I knew the book so well, I could help them on a word without looking at it. I, after all, had read Mockingbird literally over 100 times by then. I dreaded what would come next.

Joel began reading with expression, pronouncing every word correctly, obviously with great understanding of the material. He held the book open but never looked at it nor turned a page. As I listened in absolute amazement, I opened my book to follow along. Joel's "reading" of the chapter was about 95% word perfect, after hearing it only once! One student turned with a puzzled look; I caught his eye, smiled, and shrugged. He didn't pursue it. Nobody else noticed. At the end of class, Pam and I and many of the students complimented Joel on his reading. I hope it was a good moment for him because he committed suicide several years later. Now I'm crying, so I guess I'll stop.

1.) Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

2.) I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year.

3.) There's a maniac lives there and he's dangerous... I was standing in my yard one day when his Mama come out yelling, 'He's killin' us all.' Turned out that Boo was sitting in the living room cutting up the paper for his scrapbook, and when his daddy come by, he reached over with his scissors, stabbed him in his leg, pulled them out, and went right on cutting the paper. They wanted to send him to an asylum, but his daddy said no Radley was going to any asylum. So they locked him up in the basement of the courthouse till he nearly died of the damp, and his daddy brought him back home. There he is to this day, sittin' over there with his scissors... Lord knows what he's doin' or thinkin'.

4.) Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.

Many critics feel that the movie is better than the book. It certainly captures the feel of the time and place. I cannot picture the characters any other way than the way they were portrayed in the movie, even though, the description of Dill at least, is very different in the book. The movie and Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch won well deserved Oscars.

So, yes.