At the beginning of Chapter Two of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, the reader learns something of Miss Caroline's background.
"...I am Miss Caroline Fisher. I am from North Alabama, from Winston County." The class murmured apprehensively, should she prove to harbor her share of the peculiarities indigenous to that region. (When Alabama seceded from the Union on January 11, 1861, Winston County seceded from Alabama, and ever child in Maycomb County know it.)
From the very beginning of Miss Caroline's installation in Scout's first grade class, she is perceived as an outsider. We can infer from the above quote and other events that Miss Caroline may be from the same state, but she knows little or nothing about this part of Alabama, so different from the county from which she hails.
Miss Caroline does not have any insight into the lives of the children she is instructing:
Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of who had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature.
Miss Caroline is stubborn, and shows a sense of superiority: though Scout is far beyond the reading and writing level of the other first graders, Miss Caroline sees this not as an accomplishment, but more as a stumbling block to her way of thinking and teaching. Scout reads well above her grade-level and can even write in cursive, but Miss Caroline is critical of Scout's advancement, implying that what she has learned is wrong in some way.
When it is time for lunch, Miss Caroline further demonstrates her unfamiliarity with country ways. Some children bring lunch and others go home for their lunch. The teacher's insensitivity in trying to force money on Walter Cunningham (whose family is very poor, but also proud) is obvious. Scout tries to explain:
That's okay, ma'am, you'll get to know all the county folks after a while. The Cunninghams never took anything they can't pay back...
Miss Caroline still does not understand, and Scout is humiliated for her efforts, smacked on the hand with the teacher's ruler and she is placed in the corner.
By the time the students begin their afternoon session, Miss Caroline has shown evidence that she is out of her depth. She demonstrates no flexibility: if something does not line up with her training or way of thinking, it is wrong. She is in no way prepared for Burris Ewell. When one of the other students tries to explain what Burris means when he says he is leaving and won't be back, Scout notes that at least Miss Caroline seems "willing to listen," unlike Scout's experience earlier in the day.
As Burris starts to brag about starting the first grade now for the third time, Miss Caroline makes a serious mistake: she tells Burris to sit down. Telling Burris to do anything is obviously a mistake. Miss Caroline, had she been less short-sighted, might have had a clearer sense of the kind of boy he was when he laughed so rudely when she asked him to bathe for the next day. Having once again not paid attention to what was happening around her, and being unwilling to consider anyone else's position, she is no match for the angry Burris:
You try and make me, missus.
At this sign of aggression, the admirable Little Chuck Little stands up to the threatening and nasty Burris:
Watch your step, Burris...I'd soon's kill you as look at you. Now go home.
Burris hurls insults at Miss Caroline until he is sure he has reduced her to tears and then he leaves.
While even the children of Maycomb are highly sensitized to the other members of their community—including financial status and behavior—Miss Caroline has no sense of the kinds of families that are represented in the classroom. While she arrives in high heels, a red and white striped dress, and red nail polish, she fails to notice what her students are wearing. Had she done so (as they were dressed in the most rustic clothes imaginable), she might well have understood that there was a great deal about teaching and her new community that she did not understand. Rather than listening, she stubbornly pushes forward, trying to make the class fit into a reality that is not their own. Rather than being concerned for her children, she only cares about instructing them (it would seem) with the new teaching method ("the Dewey Decimal System") that Jem's teacher has mentioned (even though it has no bearing, it would seem, on how she is teaching).
This incident also demonstrates how difficult it is for people (as Atticus later advises Scout) to walk in another person's skin.
Having witnessed Miss Caroline's ill-preparedness for teaching children from a town other than her own—her lack of learning about them or the community before she arrives—the reader understands that she is very much out of her element by the time she has to face a real problem in the classroom: Burris Ewell.
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