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Developments

What Happened at the Geography Bee

January 28, 2020 by Luke Fisher

Last Thursday, January 23rd was the annual National Geographic Bee. As you may know, seven ODE students (all from Mrs. Tera Clark’s class) participated in this event. These students were Sammy Amador, Danny Amador, Isaiah Sokol, Luke Fisher, Joel Adams, and Kaylie Tello, Joshua Muhammad. All in all, these seven students did quite well with two scoring in the top ten and one of them coming in second place. 

The Geography Bee certainly got more difficult this year, with questions regarding areas from all seven continents, the animal inhabitants of these lands, state abbreviations, and the agriculture and nicknames of each state.

So, as like most years, the first round would comprise of seven questions per person with each question getting harder and harder. The first round was designed to bring the number of participants down to ten and from there move onto the second stage. The first three rounds of questions were fairly easy with them regarding the states and being multiple choice. After the first rounds, it certainly got difficult with the questions focusing on weird but true facts, animal questions, and the seventh round of questions revolving around lesser-known countries. The most difficult round was quite easily the last round of questions. In the first round,  only two or three people getting their questions right.

After the number of people had been reduced to ten (with five ODE students being knocked out) the remaining people were asked one more oral question then moved on to a visual question. The visual question was responsible for knocking out even more contestants, with many people getting a question wrong in both this question and the one before and therefore getting plenty of who was left out. Then there was three. Faith, Danny, and Reagan. Reagan got knocked out and left Danny and Faith left with a wrong question each. In one last round, Danny got knocked out and left the girl named Faith the champion for the second year running. 

With the Bee being over, all the contestants were able to each snacks and talk then go home. With the thrilling Geography Bee being over I recommend that anyone who is reading this go to next year’s Geo Bee which will most likely be held in Riverside Village Hall like this year or Riverside Public Library like the year before.

Filed Under: Developments Tagged With: bee, geography

The Return of the Owl

November 7, 2019 by Luke Fisher

Luke Fisher

This week marks the long awaited return of ODE’s very own newspaper. The ODE Owl. 

Last year students Danny Amador, Oscar Caudell and Luke Fisher had the idea to create an ODE newspaper for students and their families. The paper ran for four issues publishing one every two weeks. When the 2019-2020 ODE year started it was revealed that it had a small chance of coming back. But now we can exclusively reveal that on November 8th they will be releasing a six page Special Edition paper. This behemoth issue will pick up where it left off with news from both the last session and news on what’s to come. The paper, ODE To Journalism can reveal, has lost the majority of its staff and is on the hunt for new members to join. This means that any student who wishes to submit articles to their paper or even join the ODE Owl have a much better chance.

So why are they even coming back? Don’t they know that they have some healthy competition in the form of us? Odetojournalism.com and the ODE Owl are not rivals. They have two completely different formats, articles, and ways of distribution. We are planned in class. Written over the week and published on Thursdays. The ODE Owl are planned during the week, Written during the week, and handed out on fridays. The ODE Owl does have a website but for completely different reasons. 

What is the point of actually reading their newspaper? For one they sort of put all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. On average they put over a dozen articles in a single copy of their paper. They have class recaps, opinions and editorials, recent news, comics, games, and more. All of this content for free!

Please go check out the ODE Owl and support their hard work. Their website is odeowl.wixsite.com/paper and if you have any questions or comments their email is odeowlnews@gmail.com 

Filed Under: Developments

Costume Day Recap

November 7, 2019 by Luke Fisher

On October 11th it was announced that the first of many new spirit days would be Costume Day. Costume Day gave students a chance to dress up and use their Halloween Costumes at ODE. At the time of this going public, Costume Day was just two weeks ago and I got to see the results for myself. I saw everything from an awesome home-made spiderman costume to an evil witch to a ghost capturing ghost-buster. The sad thing is that only around 30% of ODE students actually dressed up. Some had reason like no costume because they don’t celebrate Halloween. Some people had costumes but they were too fragile to wear. Those two reasons combined make up a good portion of ODE but there were still others with costumes the could wear and celebrated Halloween who still didn’t wear theirs. On the bright side it made the people who did wear costumes have there’s stand out from the crowd. These select students pictures are down below. 


Willow Black as Fuzzy Monster

Reagan Whatkins as SpiderMan


Zoomy Muhamad as Witch

A lot of 1st and 2nd Graders as Tron? Ninja, Princess, Flower Girl, and Army Man

Ella ? as a Fox, Vampire Teeth Mistress, Agnes Caudell as Witch, Melin Ginter as herself, Zalyin Marshall as Elf, Clara Fisher as GhostBuster

Filed Under: Developments

What Happened To The ODE Owl?

October 11, 2019 by Luke Fisher

The first and only ODE newspaper is the ODE Owl. Run by Danny Amador, Oscar Caudell, and myself, the ODE Owl is a student run newspaper for everything ODE. 

One thing that many students noticed in the first week of this session was that there was no ODE Owl coming out. And then the next week there was no paper coming out, nor the week after that. Why has it not started back up? What’s causing the problem? Will it even continue? And if it does, will it address the issues from last year?

“The ODE Owl is fantastic and a great addition to the community.” This is a quote from director Jenny Ginter which was one of the many helpful words spoken to us that helped get the paper from an idea to reality. Sadly, ever since then, our little idea has hit a few bumps. 

Luckily I can offer some inside info on what these ‘bumps’ were. The main causes for the delay or setback in printing is miscommunication between the three editors (which I happen to be one of), problems from last year rolled over into this session, and that the chief advisor, Valerie Criminger left ODE, leaving the paper without it’s main advisor.

So what caused the miscommunication between the editors? While the main source of this specific issue was not having a strict process in which each article had to go through. And since the chief editor was set up to change every week, one would have a strict long process in which an article must pass certain requirements and another would use a totally different order of things.

Next was the problems from last year that just rolled over into the new session. These included technical problems like no specific look of the paper, no set fonts, and also no set text sizes. Then there was the problem of not agreeing on certain concepts. What would happen is that the editors would not agree on certain aspects which then forced the chief editor of the week to decide on it by himself so that a paper could even come out that week.

That brings us to  the third problem of the paper’s advisor leaving. Sadly our main advisor decided to not return to ODE for the 2019-2020 school year. This in turn left the ODE Owl with one of it’s main foundations. Ms. Criminger would not only help with proofreading articles, but also help by giving quotes, supplying the Owl with teachers opinions, and giving us info and what major events were coming up.   

To answer what’s probably the biggest ODE Owl related question is yes, the paper is going to start back up and possibly by the time this is published it may already be in print. The ODE Owl is planning to kick of this years papers with a special edition “Summer News.” This version is hoping to be a super-sized version of the normal paper whilst mostly revolving around everything that has happened in the first few weeks and covering the ODE related events that happened during the summer. 

Lastly, this brings us to the final change. The paper is once again changing it’s schedule. The new way of how it will work is that the second week of every month the ODE Owl will come out with a physical, in print version of the paper. Then on the last week of that same month the paper will come out with a digital copy of a brand new issue.

That brings us to the end. Hopefully this article has helped bring light to these issues and by the time this is published the “Summer News” edition may have already come out. If you would like to contact any of the ODE Owl editors you can reach them at odeowlnews@gmail.com and visit their website at odeowl.wixsite.com/paper

Filed Under: Developments

ODE Academy vs Upper School.

October 11, 2019 by Luke Fisher

Ever since ODE Upper School’s inception its role was that of more stricter learning for students in grades 7th through 12th. Then out of nowhere it was changed to ODE Academy. Ever since then it’s been the topic of some of the biggest questions of the ODE 2019-2020 school year: What is ODE Academy, why did they change it from Upper School, why is it better, and what’s the difference?  

Right off the bat, the name. Why did they change the name? Ms. Jenny Ginter, ODE Director, mentioned to her students on the first day of her new Journalism class that she and other teachers believed that this name made more sense because it sounded more orderly, as if the name told parents that this was stricter learning. 

During that same class, Ms. Ginter remarked, 

 “ODE Academy is what many of the ODE teachers had envisioned for the original ODE Upperschool.” Sadly many of the original teachers who supported this have left in the past few years. The only staff member who was here from the first years of ODE is Ms. Ginter who at the time was co-director. Why is it better? Well according to the ODE description page, “Children in elementary learn at such widely different rates and in so many different ways, and do not have the independence to make their educational choices for themselves. Young adults in high school, although they may attack their workloads in different manners, need to function independently, and work within the perimeters laid out for them, taking the responsibility on for themselves.” 

What does this mean? To put it simply, children in elementary have to learn a lot of different things then in Academy they can zero in on what they really want to learn. What’s different with the schedule? Well students take three classes that are an hour long each , and then two classes that are an hour and a half long. From what I’ve gathered the two classes that are an hour long are more learning based. The first hour long classes are more creativity based. Classes like P.E. and Art don’t have as much of a strict curriculum as ones like Literature, U.S. Geography, or Speech and Debate. However, that still doesn’t answer why it is better. In some of the students I asked opinions it ranged from the changes in the schedule to the inclusion of P.E. Luckily I (or rather the Director) have the answers. Earlier this week I was able to catch ODE Director Jenny Ginter in an interview. The first question I asked was what was the original vision of ODE Academy. She had this to say, “The original vision of One Day Enrichment when it was founded 14 years ago was primarily to engage students in an educational and useful setting while the homeschooling parent took some time to tend to other things. It was originally just for the elementary grades. Our classes were group oriented, and focused on classes and areas that were not usually tackled in the course of a homeschool day at home. We knew and trusted that the basics were being taught and learned at home according to the homeschooling philosophy of the parent. By the end of the very first session we already added our preschool program in a further effort to help moms (and dads) get this time away from their homeschooling duties. It took a little more time to add the upper school, and this happened gradually as our elementary students graduated to junior high and beyond. For the first year or two Elizabeth York taught all the classes in upper school. The upper school portion of ODE has continued to grow until now it accounts for almost half of our students. We have grown to several teachers and we have added all kinds of classes that range from choir to Chemistry with a lab, alternating years. We are very excited about this growth and the need that it fills within our homeschool community. 

However, it became clear that our goals and vision for upper school needed to differ from that of our preschool and elementary. It was brought to my attention by the staff that we needed to do something to differentiate our upper school from our “enrichment” approach that we take in elementary. Upper school students are farther along in the journey towards adulthood and we love to watch them mature into thoughtful, independent, motivated young people. To that end, we realized we need to require a commitment from our students to do their best in the classes, to commit to doing all the required work, to reach out for help when things are unclear. We already had implemented an online grading system which spoke to our students’ needs to make every class count towards a credit that could be placed on a transcript. Not only did we need to make those kinds of changes for our students, but we needed to actually change the name to communicate to prospective and current students and families that attend our program (the Academy) requires commitment and purpose on their part – it is no longer enrichment and a time off for mom, where homework is optional if the family desires and time allows.” The second biggest question I had was, “What prompted you to change it this year.”  She said, “The change came this year in response to teachers’ need to require a standard within each class to decrease the problem of students who are around to kill time and hold back the progress of everyone involved.” This led right into my next question of how much support she got when she told the staff. “Because the idea of naming upper school ODE Academy came from the staff, they were 100% in agreement and looking forward to the possibilities and future ahead,” she replied. My final question was what are the real changes between ODE Academy and Upper School. Her reply was, “The only real difference is what we are communicating. Elizabeth York has already established ODE as an AP test center. We have offered multiple AP classes over the years which the students have taken at OPRF. Brandon Fenner, Cindy Miller, Tara Clark, and of course Elizabeth York have taught classes that culminated in AP testing, and now we are an approved test center. We have offered Biology and Chemistry with a lab alternately for many years. We have added our online grading system, Thinkwave. But with this change in name, we hope to communicate the level of academic standard that we provide and expect in our ODE Academy.” And that is why ODE Academy is different and possibly better than ODE Upperschool

Filed Under: Developments, Uncategorized Tagged With: lukefisher

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