The Rider Chronicle

Rider Soccer Kicks Off Season

adviser — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:14:29 +0000

Carrigan Career Center

adviser — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:09:38 +0000

Dangers of Energy Drinks

admin — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:47:15 +0000

We’ve all seen the large cans of energy drinks in the convenience store.

Current freshman at Midland University, graduate of Rider High School’s Class of 2011, Sammie Hislop, knew them a little better then most.

“I used to drink two or three trucker sized cans everyday,” Hislop said.

Although the can says “hours of energy now with no crash later,” that wasn’t necessarily true for Hislop.

“They made me feel energized for a couple hours, then I started to get dehydrated and really bad headaches,” Hislop said.

These sugar filled drinks make you crash and can really harm your body.

“Energy drinks contain large amounts of sugar, ephederine, guarana, and ginseng,” head softball coach Alisha Crouch said. “These ingredients combined can cause dizziness, shakiness, elevated blood pressure, elevated heart rate, dehydration and loss of sleep.”

For Coach Crouch, the effects of energy drinks are closer to home.

“I have seen negative effects on someone I know,” she said. “They had overdosed on energy drinks and began to develop random seizures,” Crouch said.

Coach Crouch reminds her athletes on a daily basis about the effects of drinking energy drinks.

“I do not like for my athletes to drink energy drinks and I constantly nag them about it,” Crouch said. “I do not drink energy drinks and my children won’t be allowed to drink them either.”

Not only are these drinks harmful to your body, they are also harmful to your wallet.

“I drank them so much because they tasted so good,” Hislop said. “But they made me really broke because they cost so much.”

Hislop was hospitalized her senior year for her large consumption of these beverages.

“The doctors said I needed to drink more water and that I can’t drink them anymore because they dehydrated me so bad,” Sammie said. “I haven’t drank them since.”

Powerlifting Goes For Gold This Saturday

adviser — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:47:09 +0000

Rider Raider powerlifting is going for gold this Saturday at their first meet of the season. The lifters see this as not only their first meet, but also as their first step toward regionals.
“We are very confident this season,” Head Powerlifting Coach Bill Davison said. “We have four girls and one boy who were regional qualifiers last year returning.”
The team consists of mostly veteran lifters but there are newcomers who show just as much potential. Every one of them has his or her own unique strengths and abilities that they bring to the table, but they all have one thing in common.
“Dedication, man,” first year lifter Colton Baley said. “Lifters are unique, a breed of their own.”
No one on the team plans on achieving less than their best. For many of them, that’s what it’s all about, being the best they can be.
“I’m really looking forward to getting the season started and seeing how far our athletes will go,” Davison said. “They all have goals they want to accomplish and they push themselves very hard to reach those goals.”
But of course it wouldn’t be a sport if lifters only competed with themselves. To the judges, it’s all about how one does compared to the competition.
“Last year we had nine lifters that qualified for regionals,” Davison said. “This year I would like to have more than that qualify.”
With five regional qualifiers returning to the team this season lifting in combination with the new comers, that’s definitely a possibility. Especially with the drive shared by every member of the team. Not one of them will accept less than their best.
“The lifters are always trying to get heavier weights or new personal bests,” Davison said. “Each competitor in power lifting has a strong desire to compete and a willingness to push beyond where they started.”

Lady Raiders ready for season after winning Fantasy of Lights

adviser — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:59:27 +0000

One year ago, the Lady Raiders made their first playoff appearance in 21 years. Today they’re ranked 12th in the state. “I’m looking forward to see how this team gels and comes together,” Ghazal said. “They have worked extremely hard in the off season, and we are excited to see how that pays off.”
The Lady Raiders say their goals include making playoffs, winning district and winning playoff games.
“This team is very talented, so the sky’s the limit,” Ghazal said. “I don’t want to tie us down or for us to become satisfied after accomplishing just one of our goals. Last year’s team did a great job of going above and beyond expectations.”
Ghazal is happy about the team’s strength.
“We are so deep,”Ghazal said. “We have a lot of excellent players. Taliyah Brooks and Jennifer Sissel will get a lot of attention and rightfully so. They work really hard and are very talented.”
Ghazal had been at small town schools his entire life before moving to Rider last year.
“I loved the community aspect of those schools,” Ghazal said. “I thought Rider would be much more fragmented, but it has been the complete opposite. We have an extremely close coaching staff and faculty that really support one another and their student athletes. One Family, One Team is not just a slogan!”
Already this year, the team became the first Lady Raider basketball team since 1989 to win first place in the Fantasy of Lights tournament held over Thanksgiving break.

Tennis goes far, returns champs

adviser — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:58:13 +0000

The tennis team really showed the meaning of One Family, One Team after making it to the state finals.
“It was really an amazing feeling. We were the underdogs so it felt good to come back and prove to everyone we were able to win it for all the Regional title we felt belonged to us,” junior tennis player Melinda Johnson said.
Though proving people wrong felt good to Johnson, it wasn’t all about that.
“Whenever you’re on the court it’s all you,” she said. “You really have to believe in yourself when you’re out there.”
Johnson said it took a lot of hard work and dedication for the tennis team to make it this far, and they are proud of themselves and everything they do for their team.
Out on the court the focus is winning, but for the team, the bigger picture was about being a family and overcoming the challenges that were in front of them. That challenge for them was making it to state, despite not winning.
“It’s not about winning,” Johnson said. “It’s about being there, in the moment, and having pride in your teams.”

Wichita Falls Optimist Clubs work to support underpriveleged children around holidays

EmmaWhite — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:56:51 +0000

While most people may recognize the name of the Sunrise Optimist Club, very few people know exactly what it is they do. Even fewer realize that there are actually three different optimist clubs in Wichita Falls alone. The three clubs are all affiliated with one another through Optimist International, but they have different goals and focuses.
“[The Sunrise Optimist Club meets] at 6 o’clock in the morning. That’s why its called sunrise, and some people don’t like that because they don’t want to get up that early. So it’s mainly for working people that couldn’t go to a noon meeting. And the other ones have different distinctions like that also, but we all work for the same thing and oftentimes we work together,” Sunrise Optimist Club secretary and treasurer James Price said.
Many people can hear the phrase ‘Optimist Club’ had have no idea what it entails. Perhaps it is a group of really happy people? While that may be true, the clubs don’t have anything to to with themselves. It is all for others.
“Our motto is, ‘friend of youth,’ and our whole job of what we try to do is help kids in a higher local area as much as possible,” Price said.
Price is also a sixth grade science teacher at Zundy Junior High. He works with kids every day, and continues to involve himself in this community service for the underprivileged and the extraordinary.
“This is a different type of community service than [my wife and I have] done before and we just love it,” Price said. “It’s really a lot of fun to give to others and to see the joy that it brings, to see the girls play softball.”
Price is referring both to his club’s annual Christmas party that supports kids from the Boy’s and Girl’s Club and the Sunrise Optimist Softball park complex, just across the parking lot from memorial stadium.
“We have a Christmas party each year where we bring underprivileged kids in, and we have Santa Claus there, and a magician. They all get presents, and things like that,” Price said.
The Optimist Club of Wichita Falls, which is a different club than the Sunrise Optimist’s, takes a different approach to Christmas.
“Their primary fundraiser is they sell Christmas trees,” Price said. His own club takes part in a different fundraiser, which many thrill seekers are likely to recognize.
“We just did our biggest fundraiser of the year for the 12th year in a row. We were the sponsors for the Sunrise Optimist haunted house,” Price said. “We had six different booster clubs working with us, and we brought in about $17,000. The booster club gets 75 percent of the money, we receive 25 percent.”
Of course, the money doesn’t actually end up in the hands of the Club members. It goes out to scholarships, notably the Young Texan/Tex-Anne program.
“Once a month we have students join our Young Texan/Tex-Anne program where they compete for college scholarships,” the Sunrise Optimist Club webpage states.
Applicants must be 16-18 years of age, preferably be a junior in high school, and must write out a resume of their scholastic, extracurricular, community and religious service, employment, hobbies and talents, and future plans. In short, applicants must be extremely well rounded.
“We have a contest every month, and of the winners at state last year 5 out of 24 came from our club,” Price said. “And there’s hundreds of optimist clubs in Texas. All of [our winners] received college scholarships for going through that program.”
The Red River Optimist Club sponsors two $500 scholarships to seniors committed to attending Vernon College or Midwestern State University to study either nursing or education.
The Sunrise Optimist Club has not been much affected by the economic recession. Their problems in the past few years have been of a different sort.
“We’re an aging club,” said Price. “The average age is probably 60 years old. So as we get older there’s things that we’re having to hire people to do that we used to do at the softball field.”
Despite hardships the Optimist Clubs in Wichita Falls are determined to continue serving kids.
“Our club is 52 years old,” Price said. “My wife and I have been members for five, almost six, years now. It’s a very good feeling.”

Purposes of the Optimist Cub:

“To develop optimism as a philosophy of life;
To promote an active interest in good government and civic affairs;
To inspire respect for law;
To promote patriotism and work for international accord and friendship among all people;
To aid and encourage the development of youth;
We do this in the belief that the giving of one’s self in service to others will advance our well-being, our community, and the world.”

Teacher overcomes struggles to become what she is today

Kayla Holcomb — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:55:42 +0000

She could see it in their faces as she walked through the door and introduced herself as their new teacher, ‘Well, no one else has stayed very long, so you’re not either.’ Whispers spread around the room. They were saying if they acted bad enough maybe she would leave just like all the others, and then they could keep bringing in new teachers. It was January when she accepted a job teaching a class who had gone through four substitutes during the entire first semester. “It was a huge adjustment for them to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going anywhere,” math teacher Mrs. Lydia Coyle said. “Once they realized that, I was able to build a rapport with them, but there were some discipline issues at first.”
Coyle had to face many challenges and learned from that first class to become the teacher she is today.
High school was rough for her. She came to Rider as the new girl, and found it lonely and difficult to make friends at first, making her sympathetic to students now who are facing hard times or just need someone to talk to.
“It was real cliquish. I was a newcomer, so there really wasn’t any opening for me because people had already created the friendships they wanted,” Coyle said. “It was a school that was not very accepting of new people.”
Once she graduated, Coyle went straight to college, but she didn’t always want to be a teacher. In fact, her mother advised her not to go into the profession. She decided to pursue mathematics, because it had always been her strong suit.
“When I was in college, I started out getting my degree in accounting,” Coyle said. “After two years in that program, I came to the conclusion that it was one of the most boring fields that existed. I thought I seriously couldn’t wake up every day and crunch the same numbers over and over again.”
Having her son changed her mind on teaching, and Coyle began to substitute until she could get her teacher’s certificate.
“When I had my first child I realized I wanted a job that would allow me to spend as much time with him as I possibly could,” Coyle said. “The only job that really allowed me to do that was teaching.”
But her first job wasn’t as easy as she expected. According to Coyle, teaching is very different than substituting. That, combined with starting in the middle of the year teaching a class who had only had substitutes all first semester, made her first experience teaching full time difficult.
However, the hardest obstacle Coyle had to face was overcoming the gap between her high school generation and today’s students.
“When I was in school, I led a very sheltered life,” Coyle said. “I was in all AP classes, so where I was coming from, everybody was respectful to their teacher, everybody did their homework, and everybody followed the rules. I wasn’t really exposed to anything else. In the AP classes especially back then, there were no discipline issues. There was nobody that had an F in turning in homework. It wasn’t until I started teaching all levels that I realized there was such a range in the years that passed and how much students have changed, for the good and the bad.”
Dealing with these differences, she has developed her own style of teaching and way of understanding where the students come from. Junior Celeste Hernandez believes Coyle’s way of teaching is helpful and easy to understand because she is willing to explain concepts multiple times to her students.
“She’s patient, and if you don’t really understand it, she’ll show you, and show you what you did wrong,” Hernandez said. “She’s funny, which helps keep you awake in class, she’s willing to help you if you’re willing to help yourself, and she’s just a great teacher.”
Coyle says the aspects that she thinks make the best teachers are “strong discipline, but in the same regard flexibility, the ability to recognize when something’s not working and to change, organization, knowing your subject, and knowing what motivates the kids.” She hopes that she exhibits these characteristics and that her passion for math comes out in her teaching.
“I think a really successful teacher is truly happy when all of her students are successful,” Coyle said.

Former Rider student fulfills dreams thanks to ASP program

adviser — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:54:49 +0000

“This was my last chance.” The final package was here. She had applied to eight schools and received seven financial aid packages, but still couldn’t afford any of them. Five months later, the eighth showed up. It contained the information that could either make or break her hopes of going to her dream school. She was already prepared to be disappointed and to have to settle in applying to cheaper colleges if this package didn’t offer enough in scholarships. Nervous fingers opened the package. “It was huge, with a whole bunch of scholarships, and it all seemed unreal.” She started crying and knew it was fate, that she was supposed to go to that college.
Logan Nevonen, a former Rider student who currently attends St. Mary’s college, realized that, with help from ASP (Academic Success Program), she would be able to achieve her dreams.
She first learned about the program in junior high and began to meet with ASP sponsor Ms. Jaclyn Muensterman for aid in preparing for college. She knew she would need all the help she could get, because inside she carried high expectations for her future.
Nevonen had faced her fair share of struggles early on in life. She battled with dyslexia and dysgraphia from the time she was diagnosed in second grade until junior high. The experience motivated her to want to give back to others in tough situations.
“In high school, I tutored kids that also had dyslexia and dysgraphia,” Nevonen said. “It was a way that I was able to help them.”
But she didn’t stop there. Nevonen also presented a documentary presentation in the Rider auditorium to raise awareness for Invisible Children and the war in Uganda. She raised money, and led a caravan to Dallas with a friend for the cause.
“There are lots of injustices in the world that make me very passionate to step up and make a difference,” Nevonen said. “I’m going to become a human rights activist, and my dream goal is to become a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council.”
With these goals in mind, Nevonen worked with Muensterman to find colleges that not only offered classes for her major, but also best fit her beliefs.
“St. Mary’s offers the liberal arts education I wanted, but the main reason I wanted to go there was because of their mission statement: empowering women to make a difference in the world after graduation,” Nevonen said. “Their classes are based around that idea.”
However one obstacle stood in her way: the price for her education. From her freshman year at Old High to her senior year at Rider, Nevonen studied hard each day and attended multiple workshops to improve her SAT scores hoping to receive scholarships.
“Both [Muensterman and the ASP counselor at Old High] stressed the importance of studying and pushed me when I didn’t want to do it,” Nevonen said. “They kept telling me, ‘Even if you don’t want to, it’s going to get you successful one day.’”
Nevonen credits Ms. Muensterman and ASP with teaching her the essential elements that got her in the position she is now, from showing her how to prepare her application to how and what to study for the SAT, and says she wouldn’t have received her academic scholarships without the program.
“ASP helped prepare me,” Nevonen said. “If I didn’t get a lot of help from them, I wouldn’t have this opportunity.”
With the opening of that financial aid package, all of the hard work paid off and Nevonen took one step closer to achieving her dreams.

Text talk popping up in class assignments causes teachers to fear for students’ future careers

Ashleigh Robinson — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:50:03 +0000

Lower case i’s, numbers for words, partial words instead of full words, fragments. All are seen in papers turned in as final copies. Teachers say the texting generation can’t spell, and that’s a problem.
Freshman English teacher Heather Preston fears “that students will continue to use text speak in college and careers.” She believes that using the slang will be damaging to not only a student’s college experience, but to their future careers as well.
By using text slang in papers, students are hurting their grades. English teachers check papers for good writing habits. These habits stem to proper sentence structure, grammar use, and conventions.
“In English, we have to grade for grammar and conventions,” Preston said. “By using text speak, such as not capitalizing ‘I’, students show either lack of knowledge or lack of regard for grammar and conventions.”
With freshman classes, Preston has seen a fair share of papers with text slang in them. The usage of the slang has Preston wondering if the slang is “there on purpose, or if a student is so used to texting that it slips in.”
If using slang turns into a habit, it becomes a question whether it is just laziness or if it has become second nature. Preston believes it depends on the student.
“When slang is throughout the entire paper, I either attribute it to laziness or apathy,” Preston said. She said she usually attributes slang use to habit if it’s simply used as an odd word here or there.
Junior and senior English teacher Katy Katz “used to get that a lot from juniors.” She believes that when you’re typing on the computer, “you have a tendency to do the texting thing.”
“The effect of technology is having an effect on sentence quality,” Katz said. “You’ll see the ‘u r’ pop up a lot.”
Both teachers agree that it’s important to get in the habit of using proper grammar not only in high school, but also later in life.
“I expect all my students to be thinking about their future in college,” Preston said. “I try to let them know that forming good writing habits now will only help them in the future.”