Miss Caroline that she is basically self-taught, Miss Caroline all but calls the girl a liar.  "Let's not let our imaginations run away with us dear," she says.  Her dislike ofAtticus is apparent; it is he whom she blames for Scout's advancement that makes her appear to be unnecessary:  "Now you tell your father not to teach you anymore," she demands.

Beyond these reprehensive actions, Miss Caroline proves that she is cruel as well as prejudiced.  She humiliates the Cunningham boy who is too poor to bring his lunch to school.  When she notices a "Ewell" on her roles, she seizes the chance to make the already beaten-down child feel even less worthy. 

"I want you to go home and wash your hair," she tells Burris Ewell. 

...

"What fer, missus?"

"To get rid of the --er, cooties...And Burris, please bathe yourself before you come back tomorrow."

What a surprise that degredation does not win the child over! But that is not what Miss Caroline ever wanted.  She cares more about herself and her ideal of being a teacher than she would ever care about her students. 

Miss Caroline is Scout's first-grade teacher who is not familiar with Maycomb County and is only twenty-one years old. Scout mentions that Miss Caroline is an attractive young woman who "looked and smelled like a peppermint drop." For the first activity, Miss Caroline reads the class a story about talking cats but does not seem to recognize that the class is "immune to imaginative literature." She then discovers that Scout is literate after making her read the majority of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud. Miss Caroline then instructs Scout to tell her father not to teach her to read anymore because it would interfere with her learning.

Later on, Miss Caroline chastises Scout for writing a letter during another boring activity and tells Scout that she isn't supposed to write until the third-grade. Miss Caroline also misunderstands Walter Cunningham Jr.'s refusal to accept a quarter and ineffectively punishes Scout in front of the entire class.

Overall, Miss Caroline is portrayed as an inexperienced, naive teacher who is extremely rigid and intolerant. Instead of facilitating Scout's advanced abilities, Miss Caroline dissuades her from reading and writing at home. She also lacks awareness and fails to properly engage her students, who find her lessons and activities boring. Even though Miss Caroline has good intentions, she is too inflexible and out of touch with her students to be an effective, good teacher.

When Scout begins school in the first grade, her teacher is Miss Caroline Fisher, who has "bright auburn hair, pink cheeks" and crimson nail polish. She is a poor teacher, mostly because she is inexperienced. Miss Fisher is young, no more than 21, and she shows her inexperience in two main ways. First, she expresses unhappiness that Scout already knows how to read. She tells Scout to let Atticus know not to teach her anymore. Miss Fisher believes she has to "undo the damage" of Scout's early reading experience. A more experienced teacher would value a student knowing how to read. She also doesn't believe Scout when she says that Atticus didn't teach her to read.

Second, Miss Fisher shows her inexperience by not understanding that she should not have offered Walter Cunningham a quarter when he said he forgot his lunch. When Scout tries to explain that Walter will never bring a lunch because he's too poor and that the Cunninghams will never accept charity, Miss Fisher thinks Scout is being a smart aleck and hits her hand with a ruler. 

Miss Fisher is also supposedly bringing new teaching methods into town. Atticus tells Scout she needs to go along with Miss Fisher and a reader might expect that if Miss Fisher becomes more experienced, her teaching could improve. 

Miss Caroline is a new and inexperienced teacher who tries to use new methods she learned in teacher school.

Miss Caroline is a very young, first-year teacher.  Scout describes her.

Miss Caroline was no more than twenty-one. She had bright auburn hair, pink cheeks, and wore crimson fingernail polish. She also wore high-heeled pumps and a red-and-white-striped dress. She looked and smelled like a peppermint drop. (ch 2)

Miss Caroline is a bit overwhelmed both with being a new teacher and with the social conventions of Maycomb.  She does not understand, for instance, that Cunninghams don’t borrow money and Ewells only come to school on the first day.  She does not realize that Scout’s father is a respected lawyer, and as he is educated she is naturally going to know how to read.

Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature. (ch 2)

Thus, while Miss Caroline tries, she really does not know what she is doing.  She tries to institute what Jem calls the “Dewey Decimal System,” a progressive and experiential program.  However, all Scout really sees is a lot of construction paper wasted.

Miss Caroline is an important character because she allows the reader to get to know the local color in Maycomb better.  As a stranger, Miss Caroline has to be educated, and the reader gets educated too.  However, Miss Caroline does not possess the most important quality of a teacher: know your audience.  You need to know everything about your students to be effective.