[MS9] Vũ Hà Minh Châu – CENSIP 6G

MY IMPRESSION

I hadn’t even got used to studying at Roadmap when this essay competition was held. What I know and love about Roadmap is nothing compared to that of my fellow classmates. Every day I come to the center, I learn something new, and I have always been impressed by everything that has happened to me.
I khow about Roadmap via one of my best friends. Every day after taking a lesson, she came back and tell us outsiders about her wonderful experience; she always said things about the talented students there and even considered Roadmap to be her family. Feeling bored with the English center I used to study at, thinking that Roadmap has to have something special to attract (or successfully educated) such wonderful students and listening to her invitation – or one can say – begging, I decided to give it a try and to come to Roadmap. My first impression of the center was not so good, and so were my parents’. My father – an experienced construction engineer – was disappointed upon the crooked house with rusty doors, cracks on the floor, old facilities and dimming light that seems to have been rented from a second-class citizen. My mother, who works for a bank, was in doubt with the surprisingly cheap fees and couldn’t stand the “playful and improfessional” administrators who calculated incorrectly the amount of money we have to pay for my studying. Despite the not-so-good first impression, I still believe in Roadmap – mostly because I believed my friend. And I was right. That playful environment and the friendliness of the admins is one of many things that makes Roadmap different from many other English centers in Hanoi. 
Roadmap always gives you a warm welcome. I came into that conclusion right after the moment the teacher came into the class in my first lessons. The young teacher always smiled, even in front of the mistakes I made because of my nervousness. He actually TALKED to students – one thing which is hard to find at the foreign teachers. The classmates were all super friendly; they treated me like I had been friends with them for an enough long amount of time. Even that boy, who is said to be an English genius of this center, didn’t look down on me like other talented people often do. On that first day, I even had a talk in English with my friend that had taken me here, that genius boy and our teacher at breaktime. It was a wonderful experience that one can’t find anywhere except Roadmap. 
After a few lessions, I realized self-studying is a thing that each student must concentrate on if he or she wants to actually get better in English when studying at Roadmap. If you don’t prepare before the lessons and do the homework, you can easily be overwhelmed with what happens in the class. There are surprise mini tests, reading, listening and writing assignments (or portfolios) all the time. The final tests come incredibly fast, and before those tests, there should be wordlists that if you study them properly, it takes you hours (but the students get used to that quickly somehow). In contrast, there are activities in class that you can never prepare for. The teachers are creative; they always think of new games instead of the boring, old and childish ones at other English centers. Therefore, the lessons are always full of mixed feelings, from joy to sadness, from peaceful laughters to intense competition, and from surprise to scares.
Roadmap always give me excitement every day I step into the rusty doors of the house at 34/178 Thai Ha street. Right now, I’m proud to say that Roadmap is My English Center.