Let the students speak. by Zaura

Let the students speak. by Zaura - June 2025 Scholarship Essay

If it is one extracurricular activity that should be required in class, it would be poetry. Unlike math or history, poetry doesn’t get its own class. It is usually pushed to the back at English class and at the verge of getting a budget cut. Poetry is underrated and undervalued. There is more to poems than Shakespeare and his million sonnets. If a song was just a spoken word, it would be a poem. And for students like me, poetry helped me speak up. I was the quiet kid growing up that was bullied mercilessly and wouldn’t speak for days. I was very unconfident. But with a pen and paper, and with the right support, I could take an inch and stretch it to a mile. Putting poetry in the schools would help students enhance their literacy skills, make them think more critically, and help them explore a way to have fun without hurting themselves or other students. It has the power to bring communities together and explore growing emotions.

My creativity was my way to survive. When I was born, my dad wouldn’t look at me or hold me. He always wanted a boy and having a third girl was a curse. My mom would tell me how ‘ugly’ my hair was & how ‘burnt’ my skin looked. I was all alone, either using movies to escape or drawing pictures of a happy family to cope. I started reading books, writing fanfiction of my favorite characters. My dad was very into Shakespeare and I would steal his sonnet books. I didn’t understand the tragedy, the old English, the romance at the time but I loved how it was written. When I started listening to music, I loved how the lyrics flow with the beat and kept the rhythm going. Reading lyrics reminded me so much of poetry & I realized ‘why can’t I do that too?’ I knew how to write paragraphs, so why not write lyrics? I started writing poems from there.

When I went to high school, I was overweight and awkward. I was too shy to join a sport, I was intimidated by the bigger clubs like Rotary & FFA, and my mom wanted me to get out of the house. My math teacher introduced me to a ginger man named Bill, who owned the poetry club and I never felt so at home. The club had about 6 people but they accepted me easily with open arms. They adored the complexity of my poems, gave me grace and empathy about my situation, and for once I could talk. I was loud, excited, and rambling every time.
One time, the male basketball team flunked a big game and as a ‘punishment’, they had to write poems and read it in front of the class. Many of the team members expressed coming from impoverished homes and some of them experienced trauma. The coach was shocked that they could even write a sentence. I’ll never forget the team captain saying “I could never say this at home.” That day, I realized we weren’t just reading and writing. We were building trust and learning how to speak truths we didn’t know how to express. If it is one thing poetry does, it brings the most unexpected people together and teaches us to listen without judgement & to speak without fear.

Education is forever changing. As standardized testing and increasingly crowded curriculum causes students to burn out, they don’t use their imagination to escape. People don’t realize that they are natural poets because from the language we speak to the actions we perform, that is poetry. Poetry can let students express their emotions healthily and if they don’t like writing essays, poetry is an easier route to writing due to its relationship with rap. Students can even learn how to utilize grammar in their own writing by replicating poems. I went to a school where majority spoke English as a second language, and poetry was an easier tool to read and write by identifying adjectives, adverbs, alliteration, structures and other figures of speech. Short poems were used to make English more manageable for the students. When my ESL classmates studied haikus, I will never forget the big smile my classmate from Honduras when he learned how to break down simple words into syllables.

Poems speak for everybody, no matter who they are and where they come from. Poetry is a way for all of us to be ourselves and feel ourselves, even if we don’t have a voice to share it with. Poetry teaches students how to read and write. It is a form of writing that teaches students how to critically think. It teaches students like me that it is okay to speak and that they have nothing to be scared of. It helps bridges communities with the unexpected. Poetry is not just required, but a must in the classroom. It deserves as much attention as any other subject.