Some of the connections I made between these few chapters and my life is for one, I go to this small town for one week during the summer to stay at a house on the lake. The town is called Dayton and has a population of about 800 people. I imagine Scout and Jems school to look a lot like that in Dayton. It is fairly new but very small with a cute little playground and a large field for the kids to play with. The teachers at the school come from a nearby town and are fairly young but the town is kind and caring to each other. The one difference between Maycomb and Dayton though, is that in Dayton there are no black people.
A connection I made between my life conflicts and the conflicts between the characters in the book is the small disagreements I get in with my older brother. Jem is turning into more of a man than a boy and always tells Scout that she should grow up and act more like a lady. My brother is much older than me so we never played together as kids and so he always viewed me as young and immature for being seventeen years younger than him.
The characters in this story are similar to some people in my life; One being my best friend. She is very strong headed and not much of a girly-girl which is why she resembles scout. They are both adventurous and stick to what they believe. Also, the character of Atticus is much like my dad in real life. They both have well paying jobs and are extremely smart yet mysterious. My dad sometimes goes on work trips out of town for the weekend like Atticus does.
I read a story once that involved the great depression and it described a young mother who struggled to care for her two young boys in the time of the depression. She had to find new housing in a shelter for the homeless and steal food to feed her kids. To Kill a Mocking Bird is not as intense as the story described above but as I read this book it reminds me of the story I read as a second grader.
Earlier, I made the connection that no one acts very sad in this book even though they are in the Great Depression. Today, as we go through a slight recession, people are more sad and depressed than the story depicts was like in that time period.
Scout and Jem live in a world where their opinions are made for them. The adults have their own biased opinions that are cast upon the kids and make them fear people who are different than they are. It is like how my parents have formed their own opinions about the government and the political system and since they talk about it around the house all the time I begin to think about the government the same way that they do.
