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04/22/2015 08:00 AMFor the past five years, Sue Fay has been working with a group of 5th graders at Brown Middle School (BMS) who compose a local Odyssey of the Mind team. For the second year in a row, they will attend Odyssey’s Worlds competition.
Sue says, “I had a co-coach a couple of years ago who actually started this team, Michael Looby. He wanted to put a team together and started talking to people. My girls got involved, and I was the parent helper for 1st and 2nd grade—I was sort of his assistant. And then we kind of co-coached in 3rd grade. Then he left and I’ve been the coach for 4th and 5th. It’s been pretty much the same group of kids all along. One of my twins didn’t want to do it in 4th grade, but then when she saw how much fun the kids had, she came back.”
Sue and her husband, Joe, a financial wholesaler for Wells Fargo, have twin 11-year-old girls, Kelly and Alanna, who are on the BMS Odyssey of the Mind team, and a 17-year-old son, Jake, who is a junior at Daniel Hand High School. The family has lived here since 2001. Sue just recently went back to work as a part-time wellness nurse at Evergreen Woods.
“I work in the apartments helping keep everyone as healthy as possible for as long as possible.”
Sue and Joe met as residents of the same dorm at UConn. They both joined the Air Force after college as officers, Joe as an airplane navigator and Sue as a nurse. Sue left after one tour while Joe stayed in for another seven years. Sue spent a lot of time volunteering, helping out with PTO and Cub Scouts before starting work at Evergreen Woods. Now that she’s back to work, she is glad to be able to continue volunteering with Odyssey of the Mind.
On March 21, Sue’s Odyssey team represented Madison and BMS at the Connecticut Odyssey of the Mind competition held at Southern Connecticut State University and placed first in their age division. This has qualified them to represent Madison at the Odyssey of the Mind Worlds competition at Michigan State University in Lansing in May, where more than 800 teams from all over the world will compete.
This is the second year Sue’s team has placed first at the state competition—last year they went on to place fifth at the Worlds competition.
Sue explains, “Within the program, you can pick from five different problems. So when we go to states, there’s a choice among five different problems in three different age divisions. When we did 1st and 2nd, it was just sort of this practice kind of thing, but then there’s 3rd through 5th, 6th through 8th, and then high school.”
Sue’s group chose problem 3 this year, which asked them to create and present an original performance within eight minutes that put a video game spin on the Greek classic myth of Pandora’s Box. The most the group could spend on materials was $125.
They had to include a prologue depicting the original story in which curiosity gets the better of Pandora, the first human woman on Earth, and she peeks into a large, mysterious jar that turns out to hold all the evils that exist. She hurries to close it, but not before everything escapes into the world. Luckily, the last thing to escape was good: hope.
In the team’s performance, a gamer character must take on three other characters representing different evils Pandora released. The beginning and end of each level had to be marked by sounds, and the team had to create a power meter representing the gamer character’s energy level. The gamer character must advance to the final level and release hope into the world.
“Each problem usually has sort of a theme to it,” Sue says. “If it’s problem 1, there’s always a vehicle of some sort that they build, problem 2 is more technical based, problem 3 is classics. The classics problem is usually based on something historical. The kids have a lot of flexibility on how they want to [portray] that story. They make all their own props, all their own sets, the storyline is all theirs. I am not allowed to give them any opinions, or advice, except to keep them on track.”
Sue was impressed by what her team came up with.
“They did a pretty good twist on it,” she says. “They decided to transport the video game into the human body and their evils were—I’ll tell you the last one because it was a crazy idea, but it worked out,” she says with a laugh. “We were brainstorming ideas, and one girl suggested constipation as one of the evils, and they all thought it was hysterical. But they were able to, over many meetings from September all the way until they started building in January, to make it into an appropriate topic.
“So they acted out these diseases. One was a blood clot called Bloody Bob Clot III, another was Emola, supposed to represent plague like Ebola, but she was a mole that went through the body, and then the third one, they were able to soften the constipation idea with a football player named ‘UConn-stipation’ and he blocks your way out. They fought him with bran muffins and prunes. So all these ideas build every time we get together. There are a lot of these ‘Eureka!’ moments, and there are some times where I’m like, ‘Oh no, I hope we don’t offend anybody.’ So at a competition you see all these different teams, and they’re all going to interpret the problem in hugely different ways.”
Each team can have up to seven kids. Sue’s team has two boys and four girls.
“It’s worked out really nicely with this mix of kids,” she says. “Some are more sports oriented, some are more theatrical oriented, and one member just has these crazy ideas. They’re all able to pull from each other their strengths and talents from that.”
The program is supported by the school, but independent from it.
“In some towns, it is the school that manages it,” Sue says, “but in Madison, it really is parents. We represent the schools, and you have to have a school sponsor you, so that’s why our team is named Brown Middle School—they do pay the initiation fee for us. But really we’re sort of a standalone organization.”
Sue says there are three other teams in town that competed this year—two 8th-grade teams and one high school team. The BMS team is the only local team headed to Worlds this year. Last year’s Worlds was held at Iowa State University.
“They pick very large schools, because we actually stay in the dorms and there are teams from all over the country and all over the world,” Sue says. “Some of the teams coming from out of the country are quite competitive.”
The competition is multi-faceted.
Sue explains, “There’s another component to the competition, called spontaneous, where they’re given a task or a quick problem to solve right there on the spot. The one that they really did fantastic on at Worlds last year and why they placed so well was, they went into the room with the judges—I’m not even allowed to go in, so I never see it—they were given a teeter-totter and there were all these random items in the room like rocks to a rubber chicken to blocks to a sandbag, and just all these weird items.
“What they’re told is, there’s a point system on this teeter totter, and whatever is off the ground—they don’t use the word ‘balance’ on purpose—and is still on it by the end of the eight minutes can be counted toward your points. But it had to be off the ground. One of the kids pretty quickly suggested putting a sandbag at one end and loading up the other end. I never would have thought of that. I would have been trying to add at one end, then add at the other end to balance it.”
Sue is glad to be able to continue volunteering in a manner that helps kids—hers and the town’s—expand their minds.
“I try to do my part,” she says modestly.
To learn more, visit www.odysseyofthemind.com.