Preview

Toni Cade Bambara The Lesson Summary

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
210 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Toni Cade Bambara The Lesson Summary
The short story “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara is about a group of young poor children as they venture downtown to a toy store. They gaze upon all the toys in wonderment, but mostly they are shocked by the price of the toys. They feel out of place in such an upscale establishment and do not know how to act. Upon leaving the store and heading home, they reflect on how unfair society really is. There are people who are so well off they can afford toys that could feed a family for months, and other people like themselves that barely have enough money to get by. The central idea of the story is the examination of wealth and poverty in America. Just by the grammar used in this short story, it is clear the protagonist, Sylvia, is a poor

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Now in days, television shows and movies depict the poor as people with no ambition, no dignity, people who cannot be happy with themselves while living in poverty. These negative stereotypes often fill people with a stigma of being or becoming poor. Many of us in this generation, who grew up in poverty or with blue-collar workers as parents, have dealt…

    • 588 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The children in this book at times seem wise beyond their years. They are exposed to difficult issues that force them to grow up very quickly. Almost all of the struggles that the children face stem from the root problem of intense poverty. In Mott Haven, the typical family yearly income is about $10,000, "trying to sustain" is how the mothers generally express their situation. Kozol reports "All are very poor; statistics tell us that they are the poorest children in New York." (Kozol 4). The symptoms of the kind of poverty described are apparent in elevated crime rates, the absence of health care and the lack of funding for education.…

    • 2149 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the video of the single story by Chimamanda Ngozi she speaks of a boy named Fide that was her families house boy. She only knew what her mom told her, and that was that his family was very poor. She seen a beautifully patterned basket Fides brother had made and was startled, because she had only heard of the family as poor and didn't know what the family was actually capable of, because it was hard for Chimamanda to see the family in any other way then a family that needed more support. Because of their poverty she let it become their single story and didn't realise it until she learned more about the family.…

    • 958 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Working Poor by David K. Shipler focuses on the hidden side of American life in poverty through people’s stories.…

    • 508 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Democracy implies equal chance for all. Such is not the case for the black children of the ghetto, as we learn through reading Toni Cade Bambara 's "The Lesson". During the course of the story the narrator, Sylvia, develops as a character due to the trip that Miss Moore takes her on. Miss Moore, an educated black woman who comes to the ghetto to give back to the children, takes children from the ghetto of New York to F.A.O Shwarz which is an extremely glamorous toy store. She does this to make the children aware of their social and economical situations by forcing them to face the difference between them and the people who would purchase toys from such a store that would sell a toy sail boat for over a thousand dollars. The theme of this story is very similar to the lesson Miss Moore is trying to teach the children. It is that through the loss of innocence and naiveté that poor black children can have a chance to stand up and fight for their piece of the pie. In "The Lesson" all the children come from poor families. They live in apartment buildings where drunkards who reek of urine live in the hallways that reek of urine from the drunks who pee on the walls; they live in what Miss Moore would call the "slums." The children 's families, however, exhibit somewhat of a varying degree of monetary security. For example, Flyboy claims he doesn 't even have a home whilst Mercedes has a desk at home with a box of stationary on it, gifts from her godmother.…

    • 922 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara, is a short story with many different character traits. Miss Moore is a person in the short story who has many different traits. Miss Moore teaches the kids the value of a dollar in a unique way. Miss More shows that she is caring, presentable (confident about her looks), and well educated teacher, who is trying to better the lives of the kids, through out the story. Miss Moore shows off her traits in many ways.…

    • 1023 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    When someone thinks of the poor they instantly imagine a homeless man sleeping in a cardboard box or the nearest garbage can, but the working poor especially in the inner-city is commonly overlooked by society. However the working poor, in this case the working poor in the inner-city, are people advancing to try and make their lives better. They are taking minimum wage jobs so that they can barely afford a roof over their heads. Within Katherine Newman 's novel No Shame In My Game, she studies the working poor in the inner-city to draw conclusions about how to help them and dispute common stereotypes and the images people commonly view. Newman 's conclusions along with the way she had conducted her case study will be evaluated for her positive and negative points while searching for any biases she may have portrayed within her novel.…

    • 1597 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    b. The children see how much a particular boat cost, and they are all jaw-dropped and astonished. The children realize how precious money really is sometimes, and how scarce it is for people of their community to have what they own. Bambara states, poor people have to wake up and demand their share of the pie´ (13.) Therefore, the children learn that money does not just grow off trees. It does not matter the color of your skin or where you come from, people have to work hard for the things they want in life.…

    • 1181 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    She repeatedly points out that the expenses rich people spend on child’s toys are enough for poor people to feed their whole families for a long time (255-258). The disappointment about income discrepancy makes Bambara feels that “equal chance to pursue happiness” (258) is a lie. However, happiness is not all about money, and it is not comparable. In her article, Sylvia, the main character, mentions several times that she wants to spend her nice sunny day with her friends on swimming or playing games together, but Miss Moore forces them to go with her seeing the world (Bambara 253-258). For children, their happiness is just playing with friends and having food to eat and things to wear. In the story, the thing destroys those kids’ happiness is not poor, but be forced to learn about the unequal society prematurely. People have to understand that money is not everything since one is not only has physical life but also mental life. Spiritual affluence can also bring people happiness.…

    • 943 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    essay

    • 1213 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Maravi thought her family was poor when growing up because they didn’t go on long vacations and shopped at Shop Rite brand. Because of her parents, she was good at checking unit prices of goods at a young age. Then she realizes from her nice middle class house in the northwestern suburbs of New Jersey, there were kids living in Trenton who had little to eat and would have loved to shop at Shop Rite cold cuts. Later when she got to college and lived in a low-income community in New Brunswick that reality of class differences began to brother her. Living in New Brunswick made her realize there are many poor people in the United…

    • 1213 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Do poor children become poor adults? Does your financial status predetermine you and your family’s success rate? The cycle of poverty is a cold hearted phenomenon. Throughout the world families struggle to break the cycle of poverty- but does it work? In Native Son by Richard Wright, the cycle of poverty rules the Thomas family. They are born into poverty and find it extremely difficult to lift themselves out of their tragic situation. Although several individuals in the novel work to end the cycle, many of their solutions are insufficient and do not take on the problem as a whole. Bigger Thomas and his family clearly portray a typical family stuck in the cycle of poverty. Although many attempts are made to break the cycle, we learn that it takes more than a few individuals to end poverty. The Thomas family fits almost perfectly into the cycle of poverty. Bigger, the main character, lives with his two siblings and his mother. His father died during a riot, leaving his uneducated mother alone with three children, and his children without a role model. This describes the first steps of the cycle of poverty. An uneducated single parent has little opportunities to move forward in life. Bigger's mother struggles to pay their high rent of $8 while trying to properly raise, feed, clothe, and take care of three children. With a single parent trying to make ends meet, the kids are often unsupervised. Supervision is important in early life because it enforces rules and teaches right from wrong. If children are unsupervised, they miss out on learning the basics of life and how things work. Unsupervised kids often get caught up in mischief and mayhem. Bigger constantly finds himself hanging around with a group of guys whose thoughts revolve around crime. They conspire to rob a liquor store, they masturbate in a public theater, they get into fights, and more.…

    • 1848 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Poverty in the United States today has many faces. There’s the pleading face of a middle-aged man on a city street holding up a sign that says “Hungry, Need Help.” There’s the anxious face of a young child in a schoolroom somewhere, whose only real meal today will be a free school lunch. There’s the sad face of a single mother who doesn’t have enough money to buy clothes for her children. And there’s the frustrated face of a young man working at a minimum-wage job who can't afford to pay his rent.…

    • 1406 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Growing Up Poor

    • 1811 Words
    • 8 Pages

    I did not realize until about the 5th grade, what being poor was all about. From kindergarten until then, kids didn’t really pay attention to what you wore to school, what type of home you lived in, or what your parents did for a living. What mattered was how nice you were, that you shared your toys, and took turns on the playground.…

    • 1811 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The short story, “The Lesson,” by Toni Cade Bambara, portrays one of the most interesting themes in literature, the initiation story. The story illustrates a group of kids who live in the slums in New York city. They are unaware of their environment, and Ms. More is conscious of this situation. In a basis, she teaches the kids life lessons to help them strive for success and attempt to better themselves and their situations. In this occasion, she brings them to a toy story, but not just a common one. Ms. Moore is an educated woman, and she knows that going to an ordinary toy story would not make a footprint in the life of those kids. Ms. She brings them to F.A.O. Schwarz located on Fifth Avenue, the most exclusive and expensive store in the…

    • 477 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Nickel and Dimed Essay

    • 1249 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Nickel and Dimed, written by Barbara Ehrenreich has been published in 2001 for the first time. This book explains and describes the condition of the working poor in United States in the 21st century. To write this book the author who is a well-known journalist at the New York Times decides to experience being a low-wage worker for a few months. She gives up her middle class life to become and live as a working poor. The author establishes a few rules at the beginning of her challenge such as not to go hungry or always having a car. But, except for those few exceptions she decides to go through the same life as her new coworkers. She starts her experience in Florida then she goes to Maine and finally to Minnesota. Therefore, Nickel and Dimed describes the experiment and the troubles Ehrenreich had to go through while she was a working poor. She particularly accentuates on how humiliated and how ashamed people are of being poor. Shame and humiliation are essential themes of this book are explained and described through different ways such as the fact that poor people are invisible or not respected in their jobs or not able to talk freely, or mistreated by their manager even if they are sick.…

    • 1249 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays