EXPLORATIONS

Morning Courses FROM 9:30 am - noon

We structure our class times as a journey undertaken with one's peers in order to discover, create, and explore new things.

 

EACH SCHOOL year is broken up into Four course BLOCKS.

What are course blocks? We offer four terms of eight-week courses that allow students to dig deep into one particular conversation. This means that students are only focusing on learning one topic for those eight weeks instead of the seven subjects taught in traditional school settings. This provides students the chance to go deeper, ask questions, pause for reflection, and cover more material in one unit than most traditional students would cover in a whole semester.

Each course meets from 9:30am - 12:00pm every day for eight weeks (it is highly encouraged and expected that the time is spent in a variety of ways: interactive conversation, lecture, small group work, outdoor exploration, reading time, workshops, acting, etc...).

Once a student chooses a particular course, the student is engaged in that course for the duration of the eight weeks.

Turning students into scholars

Our teachers create their own courses, which allows our students to read primary sources for their own work, thereby giving them the opportunity to create content, rather than merely consume it. Our reading list includes such texts as:

  • The Nichomachean Ethics, by Aristotle;

  • Strength to Love, by Martin Luther King, Jr.;

  • Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant;

  • Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl;

  • The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien;

  • The Other Wes Moore, Wes Moore;

  • Elements, by Euclid;

  • The Memory of Old Jack, by Wendell Berry;

  • Middlemarch, by George Eliot;

  • Thinking in Numbers, by Daniel Tamet;

  • Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin;

  • The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton;

  • The Republic, by Plato;

  • Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison

  • and Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt (to name a few).

Course Examples

  • Marine Biology (Science)

  • Game Theory (Mathematics)

  • City Planning (Social Studies)

  • Fixing the Body (Anatomy)

  • Financial Literacy (Math)

  • Nature's Folklore (English/Science)

  • The Female Voice (Literature)

  • The Writings of Wendell Berry (Literature)

  • The Science of Learning and Memory (Neuroscience)

  • Math: the Quest for Wonder (Mathematics/History)

  • Celebrating Differences (Social Studies)

  • Tolkien and Mythmaking (English Literature)

  • Nutrition (Science)

  • Astronomy (Math/Science)

  • Peacebuilding (Social Studies)

  • Racial Reconciliation (History)

  • Technology and War (Science/History)

  • Civics and Dystopia (English/Social Studies)

  • Geometry Woodshop (Math)

  • The Last Extinction (Science)

  • C.S. Lewis (English)

  • The Science of Water (Science)

  • Advanced Chemistry (Science)

  • Ethics and the Pursuit of Justice (Social Studies)

  • History of the Way (Social Studies)

 

The students at OLA will be well prepared heading into college. They know how to research very well, they know how to write papers, they know how to cross over different subjects to discover real life solutions to real life problems. Their hard work and skills developed in high school will pay off immensely at the college level. Odyssey students would fit well in our honors college because we after more meaningful work and that is what I see the students of OLA are getting to experience.

Mr. Jerome Bennet, Admissions Counselor, Wichita State University