Could someone grade my essay, please?

joannecua
Thu, 31 May 2012 08:39:10 +0000

Essay prompt:

Many people believe that our government should do more to solve our problems. After all, how can one individual create more jobs or make roads safer or improve the schools or help to provide any of the other benefits we have come to enjoy? And yet expecting that the government - rather than individuals - should always come up with the solutions to society’s ills may have made us self-reliant, undermining our independence and self-sufficiency.

Assignment:

Should people take more responsibility for solving problems that affect their communities or the nation in general? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.



My essay:

As citizens of a nation, we expect the government to provide for us. Doing so would not be wrong if we did it only up to a certain extent. Of course, we need the government to fund our roads, schools, and other establishments, but when it comes to internal conflicts within the society, we cannot depend on the government for solutions because they really cannot do much about them. The government may pass new laws, but it really is up to the people if they will follow through. The people are the ones who need to take responsibility in these cases because each person has a tremendous impact on a community or a nation in general.

My country has the highest kidnapping rate in the world and other crimes are even more commonplace. Even in my school, students steal other students’ school supplies and valuables. When I was in the 6th grade, I was a class officer. As a class officer, I wanted to do something about this issue because I could not handle having to worry about my belongings everyday. Some of my classmates would start blaming each other when things go missing while I, along with some others, would just keep silent because I knew it was bound to happen to everyone anyway. Well, in my school at least.

Even if it gets chaotic in the classroom, I still think of my class as a family, which is the basic unit of a community. I, together with the other class officers, wanted to put an end to the issue of stealing. The other officers and I talked our class adviser into letting our principal lend us the key to our classroom so that we could lock our doors every time we would go out for breaks. That way, nobody could come in the classroom and steal our things. (In my school, the authorities keep all the keys and they only lock the doors during dismissal time when everybody leaves school.) Our class adviser had a hard time talking to our principal, but after a while, the principal finally agreed to lend us the key. My class could finally take the problem of stealing off our backs. The locked doors made my classmates the only people who could enter the classroom, so if anything would go missing, then we’d be sure that it was someone from the class who stole it; the problem would be easier to address the from there.

When I was in the 7th grade, the issue of stealing was still so huge in my school that the principal received complaints both students and parents everyday. Because of that, she decided to let every class president keep the keys of their respective classrooms in hopes of ending the issue, and it did end. Though stealing was not completely abolished, the number of complaints went down considerably. Could it be that the measures my class and I went through in the 6th grade gave our school principal the idea to change the school’s ways?

The idea of locking the doors as a solution to keep stealers away isn’t very hard to come up with. I am sure that a lot of people thought of that too, or thought of even better ideas, but were just too afraid to do anything. Through this experience, I can really say that people should take responsibility to solve problems because even just one person is capable of bringing about change that will last, change that is good.