TKAMB and Good vs Bad

I call To Kill a Mocking Bird, TKAMB. (That's right, an acronym...) The truth is I had never read the book until I had to teach it. Now I love it.

We had a great conversation in my class because of it today. The question of right and wrong and good and bad. While many of us can draw lines on right and wrong (though sometimes it is harder to figure out than I'd like) good and bad becomes more difficult. Today we were talking about the character of Mrs. Deboise.

This woman seemed awful. She said terrible racist things to the children. Yet Atticus, clearly good Atticus, respected and admired her. How does that work? We talked about Mel Gibson, and when we say the worst thing we can think of to someone we care about and then go back to the "I didn't mean it" later and whether or not that is really true. We talked about good people we knew that then surprised us with a not so good thing and whether that made the person no longer good in our eyes.

It was a really good conversation and I really enjoyed listening to my students today.