The Lessom Essay

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In the short story The Lesson, the author Toni Cade Bambara explains the past life of main character Sylvia, who was a little girl that lived in a poor town along with her family. She mentions how a group of children (including Sylvia) goes on a “field trip” to a toy store called F.O.A Schwarz on Fifth Avenue with their teacher, where they get a glimpse of a life they didn’t know about. Miss Moore (teacher) was the only one that actually went to college and got a degree from where they lived; her job was to be in charge of the young children’s education. Bambara illustrates two very different settings through strong imagery and actions of the characters that elucidates the themes. She utilizes a change in the setting to help us comprehend the theme of how money is spread unequally throughout the countries and how the children learned the value of money. Harlem is a town located north of New York; it’s where the children of The Lesson were raised. This town was poor and unsanitary with people who were not highly educated, ignorant and rude. In the text (pg.1) Bambara mentions “we hated her too, hated the way we did the winos who cluttered up the parks and pissed on our handball walls and stank up our hallways and stairs so you couldn’t hallway play hide-and-seek without a goddamn gas mask.” This explains just how dirty the environment was, and because they couldn’t do anything about it, you sense that they were too poor to get anything cleaned. Toni Bambara also clarifies this by saying “and she gets to the part about we all poor and live in the slums.” Slums are defined as a highly populated, run-down, unclean part of a city, occupied by poor people. Another thing this quote verifies was how rude these people can be, knowing they hated Miss Moore just a little after she first moved into town implies the rudeness they had in them, its seems as if they had

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