PROMPT: Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?
"My mom likes it that I come here, she says I learn twice as much in these four hours than during the entire school week". - Ian, 8 years old.
Valentina ran towards me and hugged my legs the instant I stepped through the threshold. I embraced her tight, and as I did, the rest of the kids began chanting my name as a sign of welcome. While I admired each of their faces, the fondness and affection I felt towards them only increased with each visage. Contentment and serenity overflow my persona every time I take that first step into the room. They make waking up at seven am on a Saturday incredibly worthwhile. Teaching them to read and write is unambiguously pleasurable, especially since I know how much they appreciate all of my hard work and effort. Whilst the other two volunteers and I provide them with the only valid education they receive, they allow us a glimpse of their underprivileged and humble reality, an insight that makes me all the more grateful for my possessions.
We have classes in a dim, low ceilinged and narrow room made out of unpainted hardwood lumber, with not even a toilet available. One of the two wooden tables placed in the center of the room is crooked and falling apart while the other is generally overcrowded due to our minor safety precautions. Coming across a rat wouldn't be a rare event either, since a grand majority of the families living nearby have no other place to deposit their trash other than on the open field next to our trivial settlement. Yet, regardless of our precarious conditions, all twenty of our students still enjoy attending the weekly lessons, as do I.
In Villa Rosa, the only requirements that the kids demand from me are affection, presence, and a small fragment of my knowledge. By providing them with these qualities, I am awarded with mutual love and fondness as well as a feeling of immense satisfaction that makes the subsequent week endurable. In order to help you comprehend my Saturdays in Villa Rosa, an ideal example of how I view our unpretentious classroom is as the closet of Narnia. Similarly to this fictitious object, when I step inside our small shed, all of the responsibilities and complications I have had to endure during the week are left behind, and I am giving strengths for the following week awaiting me.
Valentina, Antonella, Ián, Nicolás, Mario, Exequiel, Yazmin, as well as the rest of the children are extremely capable and special individuals, which is another reason as to why I adore enhancing their intellect as well as providing them with more appropriate moral standards. Every single pupil needs someone to help him or her comprehend that stealing, burning cars, among other criminalities their parents commit, are all improper actions. I might burden myself with quite a variety of roles, but I revel in the overwhelming responsibility because I know they deserve all the love and care I devote towards them.
In my own conceit, the primary reason to my contentment when I provide school support is due to the fact that I feel as if I were doing a lot more than simply helping students with their homework. By providing the least fortunate with such a modest service, I experience a feeling of self-realization and fulfillment on account of the belief that I am assisting my country in providing a service every child deserves, a proper education. Moreover, I have the deepest feelings of affection for my students, helping them grow is hardly a punishment, on the contrary, it is one of the small pleasures life has granted me with.
Angelis, don't use so many quotes from the students. That does not help the essay along because the prompt does not require any sense of contentment and experience other than yours. This is after all, your application, not the children's. You may want to consider using their statements as your inspiration for feeling content in that makeshift classroom instead. Try not to dwell so much on the background of the students. Just stick the makeshift classroom because that is where you obviously feel content. You need to make that contentment more visible to the reader by centering the essay upon you and the classroom instead. What do you experience there and how does that help add to your contentment? Those are the only 2 questions that you need to answer in order to properly deliver your answer to the essay prompt.
Angelis, you really do not understand what the prompt requires. Let me try and explain it to you. Based upon the essay that you wrote, the place where you feel most comfortable in is this makeshift classroom where you teach these students.You are not required to discuss the students and what you do in the classroom with them or how they act in class or around you. The children are not a place. You have to discuss is the place where these events occur, the classroom. What you have to discuss in the essay is why you feel content in the classroom. The answers to this question in relation to the classroom would be because this is the place where you exchange knowledge with these children and see their smiling faces. You feel content because you know that in this classroom, you are doing things that will help change the lives and future of these children. That is how your answer should be represented in the essay. You must write the essay in that manner.
