National Poetry Month

April is one of my favorite month of the year, partly because April is National Poetry Month! Here is some information from the Canadian League of Poets about the month.

If you are an educator looking to bring poetry into your classroom (now or anytime), I recommend the Poetry Society’s resources for teachers, including lesson plans that incorporate award-winning poetry by young poets, and the Young Poets Network, an online platform for young poets up to the age of 25 with articles, challenges, prompts, advice, and more.

If you are looking for books to help you integrate poetry into your classroom, try the Spoken Word Workbook, edited by Sheri-D Wilson, or Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft by Jane Burroway.

Two other great resources are this post from 2016, “4 Reasons to Start-Class With a Poem Each Day,” and this guide on one teacher’s implementation of starting class with a poem: “A Poem a Day: 30 Poems for Secondary Students.”

Here are some tips on how to take poetry beyond April!

Read a poem in your sudden downtime

Use your phone or tablet as a means of filling unexpected free time with poetry: you can borrow eBooks from the library and read just one poem at a time, or you could find an online literary magazine that will have regular new content for you to explore! The Puritan, Minola Review, CV2, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Plenitude are just a few great Canadian literary magazines that have online poetry content. You can even take it a step further and share the poems you like on your own social media!

Take it down a notch: try chapbooks, instead of books

Chapbooks are a perfect way of settling into poetry when you have some free time on your day off, but not enough time to really get into a full book. Chapbooks are smaller collections of writing, usually between 10 and 25 pages, that allow writers to explore and experiment with their writing in new and exciting ways. As an added bonus, there are many artisan chapbooks presses out there producing not just beautiful poetry, but aesthetically beautiful books, with hand-sewn pages and high-quality paper to complement the work within! Check out Anstruther Press, Desert Pets Press, above/ground, words(on)pages, or Puddles of Sky Press–just a few of the great active chapbook presses publishing in Canada right now–to get your chapbook collection started!

Take a break or cleanse your palette with poetry

It can feel overwhelming to try to read a book of poetry or an entire issue of a literary magazine, but don’t forget that poems themselves are often bite-sized! You can always use five minutes to read a single poem once, just to redirect your mental efforts for a moment. It’s suggested you should get up to stretch and move around throughout the day to keep your body happy–so why not keep your mind happy with a little poetry stretch every now and then, too? 

A poem on Ageing from http://www.dennydavis.net/poemfiles/aging2b.htm 

My forgetter's getting better
But my rememberer is broke
To you, that may seem funny
But, to me, that is no joke.

For when I'm 'here' I'm wondering
If I really should be 'there'
And, when I try to think it through,
I haven't got a prayer!

Often times I walk into a room,
Say "what am I here for?"
I wrack my brain, but all in vain
A zero is my score.

At times I put something away
Where it is safe, but, Gee!
The person it is safest from
Is, generally, me!

When shopping I may see someone,
Say "Hi" and have a chat,
Then, when the person walks away
I ask myself, "who was that?"

Yes, my forgetter's getting better
While my rememberer is broke,
And it's driving me plumb crazy
And that isn't any joke.

P.S. Send this to everyone you know because I don't remember who sent it to me! (noted Denny)

Women's Risk in LIfe by the Chartered Insurance Institute Part 4

Potential generic areas of intervention for the profession, identified in this interim report include the following:

·       Education and awareness – Educating and raising life risks awareness amongst young men and women, and of the risks associated with not engaging with, and taking ownership for managing, their respective risks in life.

·       Equality oriented solutions – Access to risk solutions, including advice, services and products, that allow for equality between men and women – such as savings and investment products that address individual’s needs, circumstances and risk appetites – even when earnings’ disparities exist within relationships.

·       Specific risk mitigation – Specific risk solutions for particular circumstances to allow women in complex situations (such as dependent partners suffering violence) to both protect and empower themselves.

·       Employer solutions – Engaging with employers, and developing new and improving existing workplace risk solutions for employees – these may benefit solutions funded by employer or employee funded options, both aiming to support closing the women’s protection gap.

·       Effective engagement – Improved engagement with women, empathetic with women’s approach to risk, addressing their expectations and preferences in regard to informed and individual advice – through face to face, telephone as well as new and technology-based interactions.

·       Building trust and relevance – Improving the image of the profession and making it more appealing to women.

Women's Risk in Life by the Chartered Insurance Institute Part 3

Women will experience longer life expectancy, longer periods of ill-health in later life, and a greater need for care, resulting in higher and more unpredictable costs of care than men. However, many women are not preparing for the costs of care

·   A girl born in 2014 can expect to live to 83.2, nearly four years longer than a boy born on the same day.

·   Women can expect to face 19 years of ill-health typically – from age 64 until age 83 – three years more than a man. On average women will need help to carry out basic tasks for nearly 3 years, compared with 1.5 years for a man.

·   At age 65, women can expect to pay £70,000 on care throughout old age, compared with just £37,000 for a man. A woman entering a care home between the age of 65 and 74 can expect to stay for four years, at an average cost of £132,000. Costs in some areas are far higher, with an average of £186,000 in the South East. These figures are the average, and some may face longer stays and far higher costs.

·   Over half of women in their 30s have not thought about how they will pay for care costs.

Women are marginally more risk-averse than men – but evidence is mixed and the impact of other factors such as education and income level seems to be more significant

• Women are slightly more risk-averse and slightly more ‘present-biased’, but this is largely explained by income and motherhood.
• Women are more likely to report that they lack knowledge relating to financial decisions and to want information and advice.

Women, as a result of lower incomes and greater insecurity at work, are less likely to be saving for a pension than men and there is a very large gap by retirement

·   During the years in which women have young children, they have fewer savings than men, reducing their resilience to economic shocks. Men in their late 30s have 60% more in savings than women the same age.

·   Men are more likely to have a private or occupational pension, and they save much more. Women are more likely to have a Defined Benefit (DB) scheme than men, due to a greater likelihood of working in public sector, but access to DB schemes is falling. The average man retires with a pension pot five times higher than the pot an average woman retires with.

Women’s lower savings and pensions wealth means they are more likely to be dependent on others and to be less financially resilient when relationships break down

·   80% of women under 30 agree they are not saving enough for their retirement, compared with 75% of men.

·   Most women in the bottom 40% of households with a household income have no pension wealth at all.

·   Women are more likely to say they will be reliant on the state pension as their main source of income in retirement (36% compared with 30%) – women who are divorced, separated or widowed are particularly likely to be reliant on the state pension.

·   The average divorced woman has less than a third of the pension wealth of the average divorced man – £9,000 compared with £30,000.

·   Most separated woman have no pension wealth at all.

Women's Risk in Life by the Chartered Insurance Institute Part 2

Women are more likely than men to be in insecure and temporary work and are more likely to feel financially insecure

·  Women are more likely to be on zero-hours contracts (3.4% compared with 2.4%) and temporary contracts (6.6% compared with 5.8%), and they are more than three times as likely to be working part-time than men (42% compared with 13%).

·  Women, and particularly those with children, are more likely to feel financially insecure. 1 in 2 women with three or more children say that their money would not last a month if they lost their primary income, compared with just 1 in 4 women without children.

Women are more likely than men to provide unpaid care which limits their ability to work, thereby contributing to lower incomes and savings and consequently lack of resilience to financial shock

·  Nearly a third of women in their late 50s are caring for an adult.

·  1 in 10 women belongs to the ‘sandwich generation’ and are providing care for both an adult and for dependent children. Those in their early 40s are most likely to be doing so, with 1 in 7 women of this age caring for children and older relatives.

Women face distinct health risks and are more likely to suffer from mental health problems

·   Women face distinct health risks, particularly around childbirth and menopause.

·   Women are less likely to meet the recommended levels of exercise, and 1 in 4 is obese, but they are less likely to smoke and to drink alcohol than men.

·   The menopause, which tends to affect women between the ages of 45 and 55, is associated with an increased risk of health problems including osteoporosis and heart disease.

·   Women are more likely to take time off sick from work, taking on average seven days off per year compared with four for men, but they are less likely to be on long-term sickness-related benefits.

·   Women, particularly those who are divorced or separated, report higher rates of mental health problems compared with men. 65% of divorced women have experienced a mental health condition, compared to 49% of divorced men and 51% of women as a whole. Mental health conditions can be a significant barrier to work, particularly for older women.

·   1 in 10 women suffers from post-natal depression in the year after giving birth.