Love of Learning Triggered By Christmas Stamp Album

R. Glenn Ray, Ph.D.,president of RayCom Learning, writes in Ohio's Marietta Times that on a Christmas morning back in the 1960s, he received an Ambassador stamp album with which he says he was "ecstatic."

His brother was already collected stamps so they were able to work together on their collections. What made it even nicer was that they could get many stamps from their uncle.

Dr. Ray pens, "Uncle Joe was the president of the University of Texas at El Paso and had people around campus collecting stamps for him. My foreign collection grew rapidly with each manila envelope stuffed with colorful stamps from Columbia, Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia. This collection aided me tremendously in my ability to locate countries on every continent. It also helped me with history. When I saw Simon Bolivar on stamps from five different South American countries, I researched him and found he was the liberator of Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela."

He goes on to say, "Stamp collecting was great fun for me. It also intrigued me to learn about geography and history. The stamps made these topics come alive for me. I thought about the person who put each stamp on a letter and the thousands of miles it traveled to El Paso, Texas and then several hundred miles to me."

"All of this curiosity and learning started with watching my brother and his collection. It exploded with that Christmas stamp album and grew with the constant encouragement of Uncle Joe's letters and packages. Learning is an inherent drive within each of us. The best leaders are those who know how to trigger the love for learning," says Dr. Ray.

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