Fall for Fall.

This month’s feature articles:

Regular monthly features:

These are some of the most influential people who helped develop the foundations of gifted education starting in the 1970’s to the present in North America. This is a small tribute to their work that helped prepare so many teachers – myself included - to work with gifted children. (not in any order)

Although this should probably apply to all people, the emphasis is on providing spiritual sustenance for young people at their most vulnerable adolescent years. What should be the goals of education, religious instruction, social/psychological care of teenagers?

1. Search for meaning and purpose – through community service, hearing important teaching stories and finding personal meanings. Helping them express how they, like so many before, experience things in their lives.
2. Longing for solitude and silence – rarely used in our hectic world full of constant stimulation.
3. Urge for transcendence – to push beyond limits and experience positive and meaningful moments such as when an athlete goes beyond exhaustion to completion of a race. What lies beyond that which is ordinary in life needs to be discussed and taught. Many young people turn to drugs and alcohol to test and go beyond the limits.
4. Hunger for joy and delight – having occasions to celebrate and express gratitude. Sharing pain and suffering are not the only ways to connect to others.
5. Creative drive – there is support of artistic expression in the very young, but then there is a stifling of creativity in adolescent education.
6. Being called for initiation – establishing individual and group rites of passage, rituals and programs that move young people into adulthood.
7. Deep connections - to self, community, heritage, nature, faith, traditions.

Sept 8 – International Literacy Day

Sept 16 – International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone layer

Sept 18 – Full Moon tonight

Sept 21 – International Day of Peace

Sept 22 – First day of Fall Autumnal Equinox

Last week – World Maritime Day

This is also Big Brothers Month and Arthritis Month

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• since 1970, Canadian hospitals and clinics have performed 2,588,550 abortions. In 2002 there were 105,154. Women in their 20’s accounted for 52% and that is at a rate of 26 out of every 1000 women in that age group.
• There have been over five million ocean temperature readings and two million measurements of salinity over the past 40 years in order to detect ocean warming trends and global warming in general.
• A scene in ET was voted No. 1 most moving moment in TV, film, or sport history. Scenes from The Green Mile, Titanic, It’s a Wonderful Life and Ghost were the next most moving.
• Recycling one tonne of paper saves: 17 trees, 30,593 litres of water, 2,037 litres of oil, 266 Kg of air pollution and 4,077 kwh of energy.
• On Dec. 27/2004, scientists/astronomers recorded a cosmic explosion across the Milky Way from Earth that gave off as much energy in 1/10^th of a second as the sun does in 100,000 years. It is only the third explosion ever detected. The explosion was 50,000 light years away but powerful enough to bounce off the moon and disturb the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Satellites and spacecraft receptors were overloaded and low-frequency radio transmissions were affected. However, we were lucky this time because the atmosphere blocked most of it.

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Hyperlinks: Here is a neat way of moving around in a document using hyperlinks. Everybody has seen them - a small hand appears over underlined words. Now you can create them for your indexes, newsletters, experiments, etc.

To edit the wording of a hyperlink, use arrow keys to enter hyperlinks to change individual letters or words. To edit the destination of the hyperlink, highlight the whole thing, right click on the mouse, go to Hyperlink, and then Edit.

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Interesting Career (1): Certified Fight Director

In many plays and movies there are fight scenes. They may or may not involve weapons. If there are weapons, they might be guns, swords, knives, etc.

A fight director teaches actors how to fight like they mean it but in a controlled way so that nobody gets hurt. The action has to be believable but extremely well choreographed for safety’s sake. Armed and unarmed combat methods are taught. That involves falls, rolls, kicks, slaps, punches, chokes, handling of weapons in a realistic way.

Besides the basics of the actions, there must also be attention to the raw and direct emotions that make fight scenes spontaneous and inevitable.

Besides the above, there must also be a knowledge of accuracy relating to what is happening. Medical texts must be consulted to determine if blood under the circumstances oozes or spurts. How much blood should come out of an arm, stomach, or leg wound? How long should staggering go on after a full simulated abdominal piercing?

There must also be a great understanding how many weapons are actually used and applied in battle. The use of broadswords, rapiers, sabres, daggers and axes all have different movements and objectives.

To become a fight director requires takes about 9 years. There are three combatant levels to complete and two apprenticeships.

In this profession, people study groundwater, remediation of soil and water after contamination, and risk assessment for companies that want to build in areas that might be environmentally sensitive.

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(in an email from a friend)

"We are each so much more than what some reduce to measuring." -Karen Kaiser Clark

Our society places great emphasis on how well each person is doing. It makes us judgmental and competitive.

As children we may have thought that our real value was measured by the grades we got in school or the scores of our baseball games. As grown-ups we continue measuring our worth by things like the size of our wages, the model of the car we drive, or even how many months or years we have worked.

We can't stop the measuring, but we can reset the program to help us step outside this system. We can seek to know and do the will of our Higher Power, which is beyond the limitations of such measurements. Submitting our own will to our Higher Power releases us from the competition and the judgments in these games of measurement.

Our loyalties are to Higher Power values like honesty, respect, peace, and wholeness. Today, remember that your value isn't measured on a man-made scale.

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In the August, 2005 issue of "Gift Rap" the longest American garage/yard sale was advertised. Guess what, Canada has one too!

In eastern Manitoba from Sept. 9-11, there will be over 20 communities along a 250-kilometer route having garage and street sales, flea and antique markets. The festivities will culminate in a big dinner and party on Saturday Sept. 10 in St.-Pierres-Jolys. Exotic meats such as bison, board, pickerel and emu will be served.

Comment: Too bad it’s in September. If any organizers read this, it is suggested you have it in the summer so the rest of us Canadians can visit and participate too.

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"If you can explain everything, what's left to believe in?" - Star Trek: Voyager (Sacred Ground)

"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." – Dorothy Parker.

When I have arranged a bouquet, in order to paint it I go around to the side that I have not looked at. -Pierre Auguste Renoir

"If you know you are going to fail, then fail gloriously." – Cate Blanchett, actress.

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

A university creative writing class was asked to write a concise essay containing these four elements: - religion - royalty - sex - mystery
The prize-winning essay read: "My God," said the Queen. "I'm pregnant. I wonder who did it?"

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Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? He wanted to transcend dental medication.

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THOUGHT-PROVOKING DEFINITIONS

Etc : A sign to make others believe that you know more than you actually do.
Office : A place where you can relax after your strenuous home life.

Ecstasy : A feeling when you feel you are going to feel a feeling you have
never felt before.

Committee : Individuals who can do nothing individually and sit to decide that nothing can be done together.

Smile : A curve that can set a lot of things straight.

Optimist : A person who starts taking a bath if he accidentally falls into a
river.

Pessimist : A person who says that O is the last letter in ZERO, instead of
the first letter in word OPPORTUNITY.

Dictionary : The only place where divorce comes before marriage.

Rumor : News that travels at the speed of sound.

Experience : The name people give to their mistakes.

Atomic Bomb : An invention to end all inventions.
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