The Lesson
... without a goddamn gas mask. Miss Moore was her name. The only woman on the block without a first name.” (paragraph 1) The ironic part of the story is the fact that Miss Moore is really trying to help the kids and lead them in the right direction to bettering themselves. As stated in the previous paragraph, the children really obviously don’t care to listen to what Miss Moore has to say. Miss Moore states the theme of the story plain as day, but as usual the students ignore her. “So we heading down the street and she’s boring us silly about what things cost and what our parents make and how much goes for rent and how money ain’t divided up right in this country. “And then she gets to the part about we all poor and live in the slums, which I don’t feature.” (paragraph 3) As the thesis states the children don’t realize what she’s saying until they see it for themselves. When they arrive at their destination, Bambara gives the reader another clue toward the extent of the children’s poverty. “Then we check out that we on fifth avenue and everybody dressed up in stockings. “One lady in a fur coat hot as it is. White folks crazy.” (paragraph3). Sylvia’s opinion expresses the cultural differences and the fact that she does not understand why a woman is wearing a fur coat in the middle of the summer. It shows the difference between the under privileged kids and the uptown residents. One of the items in the toy store happens to be a paperweight that Sylvia has never seen or heard of. She states ““my eyes tell me it’s a chunk of glass cracked with something heavy, and different-color inks dripped into the splits, then the whole thing put into a oven or something. “But for $480 it don’t make sense” (paragraph 13). Miss Moore explains, “That’s a paperweight made of semi-precious stones fused together under tremendous pressure,” she explains slowly, with her hands doing all the mining and the factory work. “So what’s a paperweight?” asks Rosie Giraffe. “To weigh paper down with, dumbbell,” says Flyboy, the wise man from the East. “Not exactly,” says Miss Moore, which is what she say when you warm or way off, too. “It’s to weigh paper down so it won’t scatter and make your desk untidy.””(paragraph 15) One student states “I don’t even have a desk,” Although Sylvia understands that paying $480 for a paperweight is ridiculous, she still hasn’t realized the theme behind the story. The paperweight and several of the other items are just a part of the big picture showing that the children are beginning to realize the inequality that surrounds them. The last item the author comments on is a sailboat. “We all start reciting the price tag like we’re in assembly. “Handcrafted sailboat made of fiberglass at one thousand one hundred ninety-five dollars.” “Unbelievable, “ I hear myself say and I am really stunned.” “I read it again for myself just in case the group recitation put me in a trance. “Same thing. “For some reason this pisses me off. “We look at Miss Moore and she lookin at us, waiting for I dunno what.” (paragraph 25-26) The prices of the previous two items stunned the children, but t...