Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur Page A

with a Z, but she was very nice and a very good teacher. She introduced us to art, literature, and philosophy. I remember studying the French Revolution in her class. She made names like Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, and Robespierre come alive. She talked about philosophers like Rousseau who influenced the thinking of the period and about how the French Revolution was influenced by the amerikan Revolution. She even showed us pictures of the art and architecture of the period. She was the first teacher (one of a very few) who taught subjects as if they related to each other.
    Before i was in her class, i would never have imagined that history was connected to art, that philosophy was connected to science, and so on. The usual way that people are taught to think in amerika is that each subject is in a little compartment and has no relation to any other subject. For the most part, we receive fragments of unrelated knowledge, and our education follows no log ical format or pattern. It is exactly this kind of education that produces people who don't have the ability to think for themselves and who are easily manipulated.
    As we grew older, the differences between the Black and white, the poor and rich students grew bigger and bigger. Once a new teacher told us to make mobiles as homework. Most of us brought in cardboard, wood, or paper mobiles. One kid brought in a mobile made out of metals-not just one kind of metal, but metals of different colors. I was in awe of this kid who had the resources to cut all those different, perfectly formed geometric shapes. Calder would have taken notice.
    The school was in a largely Jewish, middle-class neighborhood. There was a little island of Black people in the middle, and that was where i lived. It was almost completely segregated from the white section. The school was right in the middle. In most of the Black families the mother and father both worked, and many worked two or three jobs and weren't able to spend a lot of time in the school. But some of the white parents were there for every little thing from trips to cookie selling. And talk about pushy parents! To this day, i believe that some of them did most of their kids' homework. Black kids wrote a composition or a book report on plain lined paper and handed it in. Some of the white kids presented their reports bound in expensive binders, some were typed, and each page was covered with plastic. I could just imagine asking my mother to type my homework for me or to give me money to buy binders and plastic sheets. She would surely have thought i had gone crazy. The white kids came to school with all kinds of junk: expensive pen and pencil sets, compasses, and one kid even had a slide rule, which i doubt he had the faintest idea how to use.
    The older they grew, the more snobbish the white kids became. They were always talking about what they had and what their parents had bought them. One girl, Marsha, horribly ugly to me, was always dressed like some kid in the movies or on TV. She was one of the super-snobs in the class. One day she came to school with weird-looking mittens on. She said they were made of chinchilla and that it was the most expensive fur in the world. I raced home to ask my mother. I just knew she had to be lying because i had never even heard of chinchilla and everybody i knew thought that mink was the most expensive fur on the market. I was really shocked when my mother told me she was telling the truth.
    Every year when we came back to school, we would inevitably be told to write a composition entitled "My Summer Vacation." Usually we stood in front of the room and read our compositions aloud. I was always fascinated by some of the places these kids had been to during the summer: places like Spain, England, Brazil, and Bermuda. Some of them even brought slides and movies of their trips. After they finished talking, i wouldn't even want to read my composition about being down South with my grandparents.
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