Hi, I’m an eighth grader taking an admissions test in the next two weeks for an academy. On their admissions page, they have a sample essay test on the link below.
http://bcts.bergen.org/images/stories/BCTS/BCA/sample%20essay%20question.pdf
The prompt was, "Why do you believe Mrs. Price acted the way she did?"
In the short story, “Eleven,” by Sandra Cisneros, a girl named Rachel narrates her eleventh birthday. After her classmate, Sylvia Saldivar, wrongfully stated that a red sweater belonged to Rachel, this causes the teacher to give it to her. Yet, the teacher, Mrs. Price, never took into consideration whether it actually did belong to Rachel. There are three reasons as to why Mrs. Price acted this way.
Firstly, Mrs. Price was eager to get rid of the sweater that had been sitting in the classroom’s coatroom for a month. For this reason, she was open to hear any claims to whom the sweater belonged to. This is proved when Mrs. Price immediately hands the sweater over to Rachel after Sylvia was the first to comment that it belonged to her.
Secondly, Mrs. Price wanted to resume teaching her class. With the sweater issue finally out of the way, her next priority was to recommence what she was doing before. Furthermore, on paragraph 12, while Rachel was lost in her own thoughts on receiving the sweater, she notices that Mrs. Price had already resumed her class as “She was already on page thirty two.”
Finally, Mrs. Price was infuriated with Rachel’s immature behavior. When Mrs. Price noticed that Rachel kept pushing the sweater towards the edge of her desk, she demanded Rachel to put it on as an effort to stop her from devoting her attention to the sweater. Additionally, it is stated in paragraph 14 by Rachel that Mrs. Price had called her out once she saw the sweater hanging off the side of her desk.
To summarize, Mrs. Price acted this way throughout the story for three reasons. Most importantly, the abandoned sweater sitting in the closet for about a month was the cause of her subsequent actions which follow throughout the story. Moreover, if one of Rachel’s classmates was to claim the sweater as their own beforehand, Mrs. Price wouldn’t have acted as sour towards Rachel. Then she would’ve had a decent, carefree birthday.