In Good Hands

In the hands of a gifted teacher
a classroom is a magical place

In the hands of a gifted teacher
There’s a smile on each child's face

In the Hands of a Gifted Teacher
Creative Energy is Everywhere

In the Hands of a Gifted Teacher
There’s a Catalyst who Genuinely Cares

In the Hands of a Gifted Teacher
Desire and Wonder is Awakened

In the Hands of a Gifted Teacher
The Educational Agenda is Shaken

In the Hands of a Gifted Teacher
Self-Management Skills are Modeled

In the Hands of a Gifted Teacher
The Best of Reality is Bottled

In the Hands of a Gifted Teacher
Gifts and Talents are Refined

In the Hands of a Gifted Teacher
The Willed Future is Designed



Ultimate Cyan

Don't forget your ‘thank-you', please By Monsieur Fred Odeigah

I dreamt that I went to Heaven and an angel was showing me around. We walked side-by-side inside a large workroom filled with angels. My angel guide stopped in front of the first section and said, "This is the Receiving Section. Here, all petitions to God said in prayer are received."

I looked around in this area, and it was terribly busy with so many angels sorting out petitions written on voluminous paper sheets and scraps from people all over the world.

Then we moved on down a long corridor until we reached the second section. The angel then said to me, "This is the Packaging and Delivery Section. Here, the graces and blessings the people asked for are processed and delivered to the living persons who asked for them."

I noticed again how busy it was there. There were many angels working hard at that station, since so many blessings had been requested and were being packaged for delivery to Earth.

Finally at the farthest end of the long corridor we stopped at the door of a very small station. To my great surprise, only one angel was seated there, idly doing nothing. "This is the Acknowledgment Section," my angel friend quietly admitted to me. He seemed embarrassed. "How is it that? There's no work going on here?" I asked. "So sad," the angel sighed. "After people receive the blessings that they asked for, very few send back acknowledgments. "How does one acknowledge God's blessings?" I asked. "Simple," the angel answered. "Just say, "Thank you, Lord."

"What blessings should they acknowledge?" I asked.

"If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep ... you are richer than 75% of this world."

"If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish, you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy."

"And if you get this on your own computer, you are part of the 1% in the world who has that opportunity."

Also...."If you woke up this morning with more health than illness .... you are more blessed than the many who will not even survive this day."

"If you have never experienced the fear in battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation ... you are ahead of 700 million people in the world."

"If you can attend a church meeting without the fear of harassment, arrest, torture or death ... you are envied by, and more blessed than, three billion people in the world."

"If your parents are still alive and still married you are very rare."

"If you can hold your head up and smile, you are not the norm, you are unique to all those in doubt and despair."

Ok, what now? How can I start?

If you can read this message, you just received a double blessing in that someone was thinking of you as very special and you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world who cannot read at all.

Have a good day, count your blessings, and if you want, pass this along to remind everyone else how blessed we all are.

Attention: Acknowledge Dept.: Thank You Lord!

"Thank you Lord, for giving me the ability to share this message and for giving me so many wonderful people to share it with."

WHY IS “GOD BLESS YOU” SAID AFTER A SNEEZE?

 The expression “God bless you,” or sometimes just “bless you,” is commonly said to people after they sneeze. As with many sayings, its exact origin is unclear. It’s thought that the saying originally served as a literal blessing. On his accession to the papacy in AD 590, at the outbreak of the bubonic plague, Pope Gregory the Great, ordered his priests and subjects to look toward God for help and guidance during the troubled times. Sneezing was thought to be a sign that someone might be about to contract the plague, so the Catholic Church exhorted its followers to say “God bless you” to ward off the disease.

Another common theory of the origin of the phrase is the early belief that the act of sneezing would expel the person’s soul from his or her body. “God bless you” was thus said to protect the unguarded soul from the devil until the person’s body regained it.

Similarly, in the Middle Ages it was thought by some that a sneeze was the expulsion of an evil spirit from the body, and so after a sneeze the person was blessed in the hope that the evil spirit would be prevented from returning.

A further explanation lies in the ancient belief that the heart stopped briefly when a person sneezed, and so the blessing was made in an attempt to restore life to the person It’s likely that one of the origins listed above brought about the custom, which has continued through the ages and is now present in many languages and cultures. But does the heart really stop when you sneeze? Please watch out for this space for more info. Thanks! 

The Carpenter

An elderly carpenter was ready to retire.  He told his employer-contractor of his plans to leave the house-building business and live a more leisurely life with his wife enjoying his extended family.  He would miss the paycheck, but he needed to retire. 

The contractor was sorry to see his good worker go and asked if he could build just one more house as a personal favour.  The carpenter said yes, but in time it was easy to see that his heart was not in his work. He resorted to shoddy workmanship and used inferior materials.  It was an unfortunate way to end a dedicated career.

When the carpenter finished his work, the employer came to inspect the house.  He handed the front-door key to the carpenter.  "This is your house", he said, "my gift to you."  The carpenter was shocked!!  What a shame!!  If he had only known he was building his own house, he would have done it all so differently.

So it is with us.  We build our lives, a day at a time, often putting less than our best into the building.  Then with a shock, we realize we have to live in the house we have built.  If we could do it over, we'd do it much differently.  But we cannot go back.

You are the carpenter. Each day you hammer a nail, place a board or erect a wall.  "Life is a do-it-yourself project" someone has said.  Your attitudes and the choices you make today, build the "house" you live in tomorrow.  

Build it wisely!!

What is it called?

Sometimes it’s on the tip of your tongue… “What is it called again?” It’s not always easy to remember those out-of-the-ordinary things but to refresh your memory, here’s what it is called.

1. Mid-men, the male versions of mid-wives, are called accouchers.
2. The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.
3. The apparatus used in alcohol distilleries for freeing the spirit from water is called the dephlegmator.
4. One that speaks two languages – is bilingual – can be said to be diglot.
5. Ducks are never male. The males of the species are called drakes. In a casino, however, ducks is a nickname for a pair of deuces.
6. The working section of a piano is called the action.
7. Shoemakers are commonly called cobblers but correctly speaking a cobbler is a shoe repairmen. A shoemaker is a cordwainer – they also made leather bottles and harnesses.
8. The distance that a place holder falls from a glass when it is lifted (you know, place holders sometimes get stuck to the bottom of a cold glass when you lift the glass) is called a bevemeter, a sniglet coined by comedian Rich Hall (who also coined “sniglet”).
9. The device at the intersection of two railroad tracks to permit the wheels and flanges on one track to cross or branch for the other is called a frog.
10. A specific length of thread or yarn according to the type of fiber is called a hank. For linen, a hank is 274 metres (300 yards); for cotton, it is 768 metres (840 yards).
11. The white part of your fingernail is called the lunula.
12. The thin line of cloud that forms behind an aircraft at high altitudes is called a contrail.
13. A depth of 2 fathoms (3,6 metres) is called a Mark Twain. Originally a fathom was the space reached by with two arms outstretched.
14. In the early days of film making, people who worked on the sets were called movies. The films were called motion pictures.
15. The tendency of the leaves or petals of certain plants to assume a different position at night is called nyctitropism.
16. The back of the human hand is the opisthenar.
17. Someone who uses as few words as possible when speaking is called pauciloquent.  
18. People that study fish are called ichthyologists.
19. The little lump of flesh just forward of your ear canal is called a tragus – it also aids in capturing sounds that come from behind you.
20. The pin that holds a hinge together is called a pintle.
21. The gland responsible for producing the hormone that regulates growth is called the pituitary gland. It is the size of a pea.
22. A melody is a group of notes in a certain order that results in a sweet or agreeable sound. An easily remembered melody is called a tune.
23. A philologist study linguistics and etymology.
24. People who cannot smell suffer from anosmia.
25.  Loss of taste is called ageusia.
26. The hairless area of roughened skin at the tip of a bear’s snout is called the rhinarium.
27. Someone who habitually picks his/her nose is called a rhinotillexomaniac (rhino=nose, tillexis=habit of picking at something, mania=obsession with something).
28. A building in which silence is enforced, like a library or school room, is referred to as a silentium.
29. The study of flags and emblems is called vexillology. 
30. The study of signs is called semiotics.
31. The making of maps is called cartography.
32. The ear-splitting sound produced by the high notes of a bagpipe is called a skirl.
33. The fleshy projection above the bill on a turkey is called a snood.
34. People who chase after rare birds are called twitchers.

Please add more entries! Thanks

ATTITUDE IS EVERYTHING By M. Fred C. Odeigah

Your attitude can be defined as your general emotional approach to any person or situation. It is the one thing about you that people notice immediately. It radiates from you in your facial expression, your tone of voice and your body language. It is seen and felt immediately in every human interaction.

A person with a positive attitude can make more progress in a couple of years than a person with a negative attitude could make in 10 or 20 years. Take full control of your words and actions, and make sure that everything you do is helping you. Resolve every day to behave like the kind of person you want to be thought of and spoken about by other people.

The key to your personality is your self-esteem. How you genuinely feel about yourself determines your impact on others more than any other factor. Your self-esteem is best defined as how much you like yourself. The more you like and respect yourself, the more you will like and respect others, and the more they will like and respect you. Everything you do and say to build and reinforce your own self-esteem improves your attitude and your relationships with other people.

TO BUILD A POSITIVE ATTITUDE IN LIFE, there are a few steps to take highlighted here. First is to eliminate the negative emotions of anger, blame, envy, resentment, and self-pity, you make a conscious decision to accept complete responsibility for your life, for everything you are and everything you will ever be. 

You refuse to make excuses or to blame anyone else. You see yourself as the primary creative force in your own present and your own future. You realize that you are where you are and what you are because of your own choices and decisions in the past, and since you made those choices and decisions, you are responsible for whatever you do.

Second step is that you must take charge of your life by seeing yourself as active rather than passive. You make things happen rather than waiting and hoping for them to happen. You see yourself as a master of change rather than as a victim of change. If you are not happy with some part of your life, you get busy and do something about it, but you refuse to allow negative emotions to interfere with your personality or to cloud your vision.

Third, you set clear, written goals for yourself in each important area of your life. You create written plans of action to achieve them. You work on your major goals every day. You maintain a sense of forward momentum and progress that gives you energy and enthusiasm. You keep yourself so busy working on things that are important to you that you don’t have time to worry about little irritations or situations that are out of your control.

This dynamite combination of accepting complete responsibility and then designing a clear written plan for your life gives you a foundation upon which you can build as high as you want to go. These two actions give you a tremendous sense of personal power and enable you to create your own future.

Fourth, you recognize that knowledge and skill are the keys to financial freedom. The more you learn, the more you earn. The more you learn about your field, the more opportunities you will have to use your increasing knowledge. You work on becoming better every day. You know that if you are not getting better, you are getting worse.

Fifth, you recognize that personal mastery in your field is absolutely essential to success, achievement, and what people call luck. Excellent performance opens every door and is the key to your earning what you are really worth.

Sixth, you have a plan for personal and professional development that includes reading, listening to audio programs, attending courses and seminars, and taking every opportunity to increase your knowledge and skill. The more you work on becoming better at the key skills you need to achieve your goals, the more confident and competent you feel. You know that success is not an accident. Luck is just a word that people use to explain the good things that continually happen to people who are excellent at what they do.

Seventh, and perhaps most important of all, you know that you become what you think about most of the time. You, therefore, discipline yourself to think continually about the things that you want and keep your mind off of the things you don't want.

Don't forget that the principle of affirmation says that strong, affirmative statements repeated continually in your conscious mind will inevitably be accepted as commands by your subconscious mind.

Whatever goal or command your program into your subconscious mind will begin to materialize in the world around you. A new goal activates your reticular activating system. This increases your awareness and sensitivity to people, ideas, and opportunities that can help you. It enables you to put your foot on the accelerator of your own potential and move more rapidly toward your goals.

Always remember that it’s up to you. 
Thank you!

Monsieur Fred Odeigah 
Co-founder Compass Creativity Concept 

GOOD AS GOLD

A child finds a shiny rock in a creek, thousands of years ago, and the human race is introduced to gold for the first time. Gold was first discovered as shining, yellow nuggets. "Gold is where you find it," so the saying goes. While gold was first discovered in its natural state, it found in streams all over the world. No doubt it was the first metal known to early hominids. The symbol Au is from the Latin: aurum, according to some sources meaning "shining dawn".

GOLD is the oldest precious metal known to man. Therefore, it is a timely subject for several reasons. Experts of fossil study have observed that bits of natural gold were found in Spanish caves used by the Paleolithic Man about 40,000 B.C. 

However, it is not surprising that historical sources cannot agree on the precise date that gold was first used. One states that gold's recorded discovery occurred circa 6000 B.C. Another mention that the pharaohs and temple priests used the relic metal for adornment in ancient Egypt circa 3000 B.C.

Gold became a part of every human culture. Its brilliance, natural beauty, and luster, and its great malleability and resistance to tarnish made it enjoyable to work and play with. There are many physical aspects of the yellow metal which are truly amazing. Gold is the most malleable (able to be hammered into very thin sheets) and ductile (able to be drawn into a fine wire) of all metals. It is so malleable that a goldsmith can hammer one ounce of gold into a thin translucent wafer covering more than 100 square feet. It would be so thin that 1,000 sheets would be needed to make up the thickness of one newspaper page. Its ductility is equally amazing. One ounce of gold can be drawn into a wire 50 miles long! Furthermore, only one ounce of this marvelous metal is required to plate a thread of copper 1,000 miles long. That's really stretching it, wouldn't you say?  

Because gold is dispersed widely throughout the geologic world, its discovery occurred to many different groups in many different locales. And nearly everyone who found it was impressed with it, and so was the developing culture in which they lived. Gold was the first metal widely known to our species. When thinking about the historical progress of technology, we consider the development of iron and copper-working as the greatest contributions to our species' economic and cultural progress - but gold came first.

Gold is the easiest of the metals to work. It occurs in a virtually pure and workable state, whereas most other metals tend to be found in ore-bodies that pose some difficulty in smelting. Gold has always been the powerful stuff. The earliest history of human interaction with gold is long lost to us, but its association with the gods, with immortality, and with wealth itself is common to many cultures throughout the world even today.

Humans almost intuitively place a high value on gold, equating it with power, beauty, and the cultural elite. And since gold is widely distributed all over the globe, we find this same thinking about gold throughout ancient and modern civilizations everywhere. Gold, beauty, and power have always gone together. Gold in ancient times was made into shrines and idols ("the Golden Calf"), plates, cups, vases and vessels of all kinds, and of course, jewelry for personal adornment.

Gold has always had value to humans, even before it was money. This is demonstrated by the extraordinary efforts made to obtain it. Prospecting for gold was a worldwide effort going back thousands of years, even before the first money in the form of gold coins appeared about 700 B.C.

In the quest for gold by the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Indians, Hittites, Chinese, and others, prisoners of war were sent to work the mines, as were slaves and criminals. And this happened during a time when gold had no value as 'money,' but was just considered a desirable commodity in and of itself. The 'value' of gold was accepted all over the world. Today, as in ancient times, the intrinsic appeal of gold itself has that universal appeal to humans. But how did gold come to be a commodity, a measurable unit of value?

Gold, measured out, became money. Gold's beauty, scarcity, unique density (no other metal outside the platinum group is as heavy), and the ease by which it could be melted, formed, and measured made it a natural trading medium. Gold gave rise to the concept of money itself: portable, private, and permanent. Gold (and silver) in standardized coins came to replace barter arrangements, and made trade in the Classic period much easier. Gold was money in ancient Greece. The Greeks mined for gold throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East regions by 550 B.C. The Roman Empire furthered the quest for gold. The Romans mined gold extensively throughout their empire, and advanced the science of gold-mining considerably.

They were able to more efficiently exploit old mine-sites, and of course their chief laborers were prisoners of war, slaves, and convicts. A monetary standard made the world economy possible. The concept of money, (i.e., gold and silver in standard weight and fineness coins) allowed the World's economies to expand and prosper. During the Classic period of Greek and Roman rule in the western world, gold and silver both flowed to India for spices and to China for silk. At the height of the Empire (A.D. 98-160), Roman gold and silver coins reigned from Britain to North Africa and Egypt. Money had been invented. Its name was gold.

GREAT FACTS ABOUT GOLD

An inch of time is an inch of gold, but you can't buy that inch of time with an inch of gold. Gold is edible. Some Asian countries put gold in fruit, jelly snacks, coffee, and tea. Since at least the 1500s, Europeans have been putting gold leaf in bottles of liquor, such as Danziger Goldwasser and Goldschlager. Some Native American tribes believed consuming gold could allow humans to levitate.

Gold is chemically inert, which also explains why it never rusts and does not cause skin irritation. If gold jewelry irritates the skin, it is likely that the gold was mixed with some other metal.

Though the ancient Jews apparently had enough gold to create and dance around a golden calf while Moses was talking to God on Mt. Sinai, scholars speculate that it never occurred to the Jews to bribe themselves out of captivity because gold was not yet associated with money. There are more than 400 references to gold in the Bible, including specific instructions from God to cover furniture in the tabernacle with “pure gold.” Gold is also mentioned as one of the gifts of the Magi.

The world’s largest stockpile of gold can be found five stories underground inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s vault and it holds 25% of the world's gold reserve (540,000 gold bars).

The purity of gold is measured in carat weight. The term “carat” comes from “carob seed,” which was standard for weighing small quantities in the Middle East. Carats were the fruit of the leguminous carob tree, every single pod of which weighs 1/5 of a gram (200 mg). 

Please remember my friends, as we begin the new term and the final for this season, anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice - no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service. Don't be deceived all that glitters are not gold. Gold must pass through fire before it shines. So you must study hard with determination. Even though gold can be discovered in every continent, it is still a difficult commodity to find. You must seek diligently to discover the true gold that is in you. Hard work pays to be good as gold. Thanks!