Undergraduate / "yes, ma'am" / "physics magazine" - MIT answers- pleasure and challenge [3]

I've written out two answers to the questions for the mit application. Could you please please please take a look and let me know what you think? I'd be happy to look over your essays. They're both a bit above the word limit and I'd love suggestions about what I can trim off. Again, a big thank you. :D

Tell us about the most significant challenge you've faced or something important that didn't go according to plan. How did you manage the situation? (200-250 words)

Stop saying "yeah". It's "yes, ma'am."
I mumbled a "yes, ma'am" in a very small voice, unable to look my 4th grade Computer teacher in the eye.

I've heard a lot of Indian kids complain about having a hard time "fitting in" at American schools. For me though, it was the other way around. I'd grown up in the US, playing handball in recess and nibbling beef jerky for lunch. Of course, I could manage basic sentences in my so-called mother tongue, Bengali, but that was pretty much where my Indian roots ended. When my family moved to Kolkata when I was in the 4th grade, I was devastated.

At my new school, classes were in English but outside the classroom, the vernacular, Hindi, was more frequently spoken. I barely understood the language. While the other kids were writing essays, I was learning to write the alphabet during after-school remedial classes. My classmates had a hard time understanding my American accent and they laughed about it. I remember getting a basic Indian Geography question wrong in a class test- I put down Delhi as the capital of Punjab (you could liken it to asking a 4th grader the capital of Illinois and getting Washington D.C. as an answer.) I soon found out that "yeah" is considered disrespectful and students are expected to address their teachers as "sir" or "ma'am".

Things changed when I asked a couple of students to help me out. I made some great friends in the process and once they realized my English was way ahead of theirs, they stopped making fun of me. Since then I've realized that every wall can be broken simply by sharing your problems. As for my learning Hindi, I got a 92% in my 10th grade national examination (ICSE) and topped my school. I've learned the truth of the saying "where there's a will, there's a way" first-hand.

2nd answer:
We know you lead a busy life, full of activities, many of which are required of you. Tell us about something you do for the pleasure of it. (*)(100 words or fewer)

Most of the time, you'll find me poring over a physics magazine, toying with test-tubes in the chemistry lab or working at a complicated mathematical proof. In my spare time, though, I channel my creativity in a very different way- I write poetry. Usually, it's just a sunset or the pitter-patter of raindrops on the roof that inspires me to compose a poem. Putting my words in verse allows me to find the beauty in commonplace and seemingly ordinary objects and situations. Poetry has taught me to observe, rather than just see, a quality that is essential even in the pursuit of science. Writing poetry uplifts and refreshes me; in its rhyme, I find a joy paralleled only by the realization that all of the universe and the laws governing it are just as symmetric, and just as beautiful.