Group 4

The Weekend Before Group 4 Due Date: A Daily Breakdown (no, really.)

Saturday: spend all afternoon at the house of one of my male classmates, in my, uh, second-choice group that I switched into after some drama with my previous group. Hang out with him and 3 other guys in the group (mucho testosterone). Watch them play guitar hero. Create an entire PowerPoint presentation. Edit the report. Stress. Share a Tucker Max story; hate myself in the morning. Deal with ridiculous amounts of innuendo. Try to make MS Paint do what I want. Fail. Delete all files stored on my flash drive; pray that the computer is still alive when I get home. Stay much later than planned. Drive home with group members 1 and 2. Endure half-hour athletic conversation between 1, 2, and my brother.

Sunday: Set up for the IB party. Begin IB party. Chill with most of my friends and some senior guys. Discover that last year’s bathing suits don’t fit very well. Swim involuntarily in freezing water. Play volleyball/badminton. Take ridiculous photos. End up in my bedroom playing catch with a stuffed animal. Go back to group 4 house. Stress. A lot. Try to explain project to group members 3 and 4. Finish PowerPoint. Fight over DJ-ing rights. Deal with more innuendo. Avoid watching The Descent. Get home too late. Remember Psych paper due Monday morning. Do Psych paper.

Monday: Wake up. Do homework that was neglected due to Group 4. Print report. Carry report, suit, Psych paper, and 21 lbs of books back to school. Hand in psych paper. Stress. Barely make it through day zombie-style. Change into suit after getting sub to let me out of math class 20 minutes early. Sit in the lecture hall until 7pm watching other people’s presentations. Eat Girl Scout cookies. Stress. Pass notes. Give presentation. Break teacher’s laptop. Go home. Eat dinner. Finish Psych paper that my teacher gave me an extra day to work on. Consider dropping IB and changing career ambition to cashier. Fall into a deep stress-induced coma.

Thursday: Remember that the calf liver from Group 4 is still in the fridge. Try unsuccessfully to bribe brother into throwing it out for me. Decide that the meat scissors entombed along with the liver in the double-Ziploc bags will just have to be sacrificed for the cause. Wonder what “the cause” is. Fall back into stress-induced coma.

GO NADS!

IB kids have a lot to be proud of. Even if we’re at the bottom of our individual classes, we’re still at the top of the school for the most part. We are constantly seeing our names and our friends’ names in the local paper, hearing them over the announcements, and spending our evenings dressed up and receiving certificates for various accomplishments.
However, it’s not often that IB has something external (read: that anyone else cares about) that we can really get behind and take pride in. Recently, though, we’ve been kicking major butt in a few things more important to the “real world”: SPORTS.
That’s right. IB kids are owning, schooling, and dominating the world of sports at my high school. Our boy’s tennis team is almost completely made up of IB kids, and they have a great record right now. IB also makes up a large part of marching band, which consistently receives superiors at competitions. However, last night was the crowning glory for this year’s IB class.
Last night was my high school’s Dodgeball Tournament. Any group of 6-8 people could sign up, for a fee, and would play against other teams of students and teachers in the tournament. It was a typical athletic bracket, with winners playing winners until the final playoff for first place.
A few boys from my junior IB class and their friends decided to create a team called Nerds Attempting Dodgeball. The acronym for this is, of course, NADS. They managed to get the crowd chanting “GO NADS! GO NADS!” for about 30 seconds before we got it. The jerseys were pink with lettering in my school’s coloring, saying GO NADS on the back along with each player’s nickname. You know it’s the team of IB kids when they come up with a pun like that. This is why I love IB.
Now, the team wasn’t exactly your scrawny-taped-glasses “nerds” – three of the members were football players and they are all in-shape and athletes of a sort. Nevertheless, they are all IB, poking fun at themselves with their team name (“Nerds Attempting…”) and nobody, especially them, expected them to make it past the first round. We all came out to show our support for the NADS, expecting to have a good laugh watching our friends get pummeled and then go home and work on our Group 4.
Well. The NADS made it past the first round, beating out a tough-looking group of kids, and came back for the second round to go against Old School, a team of teachers, most from the Language department. When they beat Old School, we were thrilled and amazed at the same time. Nobody, most of all the NADS, expected them to make it past the first round. The tiny section of IBers was screaming louder than anyone (to our credit, we were shouting “Go Nerds!”) in support.
I had to go home early with my ride, but it turns out that the little underdog let’s-join-for-kicks team made it all the way to the finals, coming in second place after losing to a team of varsity baseball players called HIV. (Yes, HIV beat the NADS. Please don’t think too hard about that.)
Anyway, I know it’s silly, but I was really really proud of the NADS. We’re not exactly the most revered group of kids on campus, especially in terms of athletics. The guys who went in there as the NADS were the class clowns, the athletes/actors who like making people laugh and thought they’d represent IB in all its non-glory by being completely pathetic. That’s the point of a team of “Nerds”, after all. All of us were so thrilled and proud of our team for, well, not being pathetic. And thanks to them, IBers all over campus held their heads a little higher today (actually, that was just us looking to the sky and praying for a comet to obliterate all life before we have to present Group 4 tomorrow.)
So, as I leave to work on my Internal Assessment/Group 4 project, I leave you with 1 final thought:

GO NADS!!!!!