Odyssey+Links

Verbal spont Hands-on

Verbal-Hands-on

Northeast Penn

South Western

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Since I was little, I’ve participated in a program called Odyssey of the Mind. I’ll be honest, I panicked a bit when I saw I had limited space here; I knew I wanted to talk about it, and my descriptions of Odyssey have spanned hours in the past. I’ll try to be concise.

Odyssey of the Mind is a creative problem solving competition reminiscent of what might happen if you were to throw theater, visual art, creative writing, legal loophole-ing, and a healthy dose of winging it into a blender, and, on a whim, hit “puree.” It is an absolutely beautiful thing.

I began in fifth grade. I started a team at my elementary school. We failed miserably in competition – second to last, at the regional level – and we had a glorious time doing it. Odyssey requires you to write, act in, and build props for a skit that fulfills a set of fantastically illogical objectives. For example, one may have to concoct a short skit depicting a classic character leading a tour. There are obvious solutions, and then, way over on the fun side of the spectrum, there are Odyssey solutions. An Odyssey solution to such a problem might be to have a crazed Captain Ahab dragging a few unwilling tourists along for the ride as he hunts down Moby Dick. That’s pretty good, but for full Odyssey effect, we’re going to need at least one musical number, some conspiracy theory jokes, and a giant puppet or two. Now we’re getting somewhere.

After this, you have a spontaneous problem, or, as I like to call it, Winging It: The Game. Spontaneous problems give you a simple task, which you must complete as thoroughly and creatively as possible within the time allotted.

These are the concrete and factual details of how Odyssey works. It’s certainly a fun program. But this alone is not what keeps me coming back over and over, working my way from second to last to seventh worldwide. There’s something to Odyssey that I’m not sure I can convey in text. There’s a rush and a feeling that comes with being in a college stadium with 8,000 other kids screaming for your state and knowing that if you were to make an oh-so-witty Faulkner reference right now, they may groan, but they would certainly get it. My language can’t describe this. I’m not sure any can, really, but they can try harder, at the very least.

There is a Danish word, “Hyggelig.” It is often translated woefully inadequately as “warmth”, which I suppose I understand. That’s not really what it means, though. It’s a metaphorical sort of warmth. It’s the kind of warmth you feel at two in the morning when you know you are the last people awake in the hotel and you’re 300 miles from home playing Apples to Apples. It’s the kind of warmth you feel when you’ve just sucked down your third Coke in fifteen minutes and your hands are shaking, and all of the sudden your teammate turns to you to say that no matter where we placed, this was all totally worth it. It’s the kind of warmth you feel when you’ve spent three hours angrily paper mache-ing a six-foot-tall whale tooth and you finally get to kick back and say to each other that that is the single best oversized aquatic incisor you have ever seen, and it’s the kind of warmth that keeps me coming back to Odyssey.

Coaches, finally, trust me when I say this. Your team is going to put the wheels back on their vehicle (both literally and figuratively), they are going to finish their skit and learn their lines, they are going to paint their props, and somehow they will find time to create a membership sign. They are going to finish all of this with enough time to get a few hours of sleep the night before the competition.

When they perform at their competition, they are going to do a better job than you ever thought they could. They might not - and probably won't - win first place. But they are going to have learned something and gained some experience they could not have gotten anywhere else. If you don’t believe me, just ask Colton.

Coaches, thank you to all of you for what you are doing for Odyssey! To Colton, thank you for reminding us all why we work so hard for this program, and thank you for agreeing to share this with Odyssey World.

Randy Burton North Carolina Odyssey of the Mind