Getting home from school should feel like a relief, finally at peace. No more teachers, classwork, or drama for the rest of the day. For Loy Norrix junior William Jensen, the relief wasn’t there.

“School is pretty much my getaway place… I still hate it though,” William Jensen said, as he rolled his eyes. Jensen uses school as an opportunity to get away from his problems at home but slowly realized that this also brings along problems of it’s own.

Jensen seemed to be focusing too much on forgetting about what’s going on at home that he started to notice his grades dropping.

According to an article from Research Gate, “There are many reasons for children to underperform at school, such as, medical problems, below average intelligence, specific learning disability, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, emotional problems, a poor socio-cultural home environment, psychiatric disorders, or even environmental causes.”

William says that he does okay in math classes, but English and writing classes are what gets to him. “I once had a writing assignment, it was worth 50 points and I got a 5,” Jensen said.

After that experience Jensen felt very disappointed in himself. He later didn’t even feel the need to try in any of his classes.

“Coping with both problems at school and at home is definitely harder than it seems,” Jensen  said.

Jensen struggled to find ways to keep up with his school work and also find distractions for the problems he has to face at home, but eventually found a positive way to cope: poetry.

There is a huge difference in writing an essay than writing a poem. “You can just spill your thoughts out on a piece of paper for a poem, rather than writing a 5 page answer to a prompt,” said Jensen.

Jensen also listens to music a lot. He later noticed that the music written from his favorite artists is pretty much just a whole bunch of poems. He started writing some of his own and even has a journal full of them.

Jensen really noticed the huge impact poetry had on his mood: he felt more energized and happy at times, he could talk about the conflicts he had at home, school, with friends, and even other relationships all in his poems.

Poetry has helped him a lot. Writing and learning about it took up most of his time. It helped distract himself from what was going on around him.

Jensen is now doing so much better dealing with conflicts both at school and at home, poetry has really helped open his eyes a bit.

“I’m going to continue writing poetry,” said Jensen, “It helped me a lot during the past year. I do also have to start managing my time better and get to focusing on school a lot more!”