IB History

So maybe History Teacher thinks my choices of CAS activities are suspect (sleeping around and running an underground magazine – one allegation false, the other true) but at least I don’t act like this in History class:

HT: …so then Reagan sold nukes to Iran *pauses so class can take notes*
Class: *taking notes*
Roi: Did you know the elderly are having more sex than we think?
Class: !?!WTFLOLZ
Me: What does that have to do with anything at all?
Roi: No, seriously, they are!
HT: ooookay... So Iran was fighting with Iraq…

HT: Why are political prisoners imprisoned?

Roi: Politically!

HT: Who can tell me something about Henry Kissinger?
Me: Oh! Oh! He was secretary of state!
HT: Yes. Who can tell me what he was before that?
Roi: German!
HT: ……I’m pretty sure he was German his entire life.
**(Roi would like me to point out that she was joking. HT’s reaction was still hilarious.)

HT: Someone e-mailed me the other day... The email “love2kitty” isn’t going to go over well with employers and colleges.
Stealth: Wait, how is “kitty” a verb?
EF: Hey, hang on, I never e-mailed you!

HT: Pop quiz! Write the name of these events and their dates. *shows slide*
Class: This is cruel and unusual! We don’t know the date for this!
HT: Ok, I’ll give you this one as a freebie. March 32, 1965.
Class: Har har.
Goa: Wait, Mr. HT! That’s not a real – oh. *erases*

HT: We're talking about the theories of a man named Melvin Lifflen.

Me: Melville what?

HT: Melvin. Lifflen. Just say Lifflen.

Me: Melvin Lifflen!? What kind of name is that?

Roi: Sounds like something out of Dr. Seuss.

Me: *snrk*

...HT lecturing...

Someone in class: Wait, so why didn't the military do that?

HT: I don't know. Lifflen didn't talk much about that.

Roi: He was too busy talking about the wocket in his pocket!

Me: /incapacitated by giggle

HT: What was Stalin good at?

Class: Bluffing!

Roi: I bet they played lots of poker at Potsdam. Potsdam Poker Playing Conference! Like the CCCP - except PPPC!

HT: Be quiet.

HT: Over less than ten years, Stalin was sent to Siberia six times. He escaped five times.

Roi: So he was just like in and out; "Hey guys, it's me again!"

Stealth: He had a season pass.

Someone: So Stalin killed a lot of people?

Stealth: Oh yeah. At least five.

IB Lunch

IB kids at my school have a tradition that dates at least three years back. Our cafeteria is tiny, so most kids eat outside under The Ramada, a bunch of picnic tables under a big metal shade. One table on the farthest corner has been claimed as The IB Senior Table. The choice of location is incredibly strategic because 1.) it means that in the summer, half of the table is exposed to the sun and 2.) the “nerds” are easy to distinguish and throw things at. We may be the best and the brightest minds, but we tend to be ritually dumb creatures of habit when it comes to sitting at an awful table three years in a row.

The results of containing too many IB kids in an unstructured environment with food and regulars include fistfights, social experiments, iPod soap operas, violent discussions, rubix cube tournaments, and pointless “hypothetically…” conversations.
Yes, a couple of IB kids did get into a fight last year. I won’t go into details because I wasn’t there – but trust me, hearing about it secondhand was enough. Don’t throw French fries at IB kids. We will mess you up! Actually, please don’t sucker punch us. We don’t enjoy it.

Last year, there was a period of time when there was a fight at lunch every few days. Young adolescent behavior during a fight involves running around, standing up, and, most noticeably, yelling. Even if one cannot see the fight, one is obliged to yell “OOOHHH”. The purpose of this yelling is apparently to alert the administration so they can come stop the fight as soon as possible. There is no other result of the yelling and therefore no other plausible explanation. (it's nice that we have such an activist student body) One day, we were looking out over the regulars and their pathetic lunch tables devoid of TI-84 calculators (plugging them into each other for Tetris competitions is also popular). Someone commented about the “wave effect” that fight yelling has and we decided to stage a social experiment of sorts. Our table started yelling and within seconds the entire Ramada had picked it up – at which time we stopped and resumed eating our lunch/doing our homework. Everyone was yelling and half the kids were craning their necks around or standing up, trying to locate the altercation. Monitors and campus cops were running in every direction, walkie-talkies in hand, also trying to find it. It was a sobering lesson on mob mentality. But mostly it was hilarious watching everyone go crazy.
Yesterday was a typical IB lunch table experience.

The Ramada has structural support beams that criss-cross the entire underside. Pigeons like to sit on them. Think about what happens when you eat lunch at picnic tables under a pigeon parking lot. The other day, Tigre’s backpack was a casualty, so we were all extra-vigilant when it came to the pigeon situation. One decided to sit right above Roi, who scooted intimately close to Goa. Tigre talked about his vendetta against all feathered creatures while M threw bottle caps in an unsuccessful attempt to make the pigeon move. I clapped and yelled at it, which must have startled it, because right then, it pooped. Someone commented on how it hurts to be pooped on by a bird, a claim that was disputed. The physics kids proceeded to try and figure out how one would calculate the velocity of falling bird poop. I’m a bio kid who didn't feel that the current discussion enhanced my enjoyment of my taco, so I yelled at them to shut up. The discussion shifts to my opinion that paying for a sub when we have a student teacher every day is a waste of the school’s money. I comment that “a monkey could sub a class of IB kids”.
Rubix: If a monkey stuck a video in and told me to watch it, I’d watch that movie!
Me: No, Rubix, you’d watch the monkey.
Rubix: True. But if it left, then I’d watch!
Me: Are you joking? I’d follow the talking monkey!
Physics kid: We’d have to figure out a way to weigh it…
Me: Are we seriously still on this!?
Other physics kid: Just put a scale under the bird!
Me: Oh my gosh. Seriously.

Side note: SUPERCONGRATS to the National Merit semi-finalists! Yay for names on the marquee!

IB Movies (are boring)

If you guys have a couple of hours to kill – and you really want to kill those hours, not just maim or injure them – may I suggest a movie called Mind Walk by Fritjof Capra. I don’t really know if the “by” means he wrote it, or directed it, or whatever – but they are definitely “by” Mr. Capra. I own a few books by him (The Tao of Physics and The Turning Point that my dad gave me as hand-me-downs from his days in college) that I have read little bits of.

The movie takes place in France, but all three characters are Americans, causing the audience to question the exact point of the European setting other than a long and dreary hike through a swamp to an old castle haunted by a divorcee and her bratty daughter. It is about a politician (played by “That One Guy From Law & Order”), a poet (played by “The Dad From Home Alone, I Think, Isn’t He?”) and a physicist (played by “Who The Heck Recognizes This Lady?”). The physicist is an expatriate American who managed to pick up a very thick French accent in only a few years, possibly by living in a tourist-attraction castle with a torture chamber and a teenage girl. The poet also lives in France but sounds like any other American (he does not live in a castle). The politician lives in America and came to see his friend the poet after losing in the presidential primaries. He is emo, which may have something to do with the fact that the poet voice-overs his thoughts about the politician, and they are never very nice.

The entire movie is dialogue, with a few shots of an old clock and torture devices. The physicist spouts opinions while the politician is emo and the poet randomly says lines of poetry that the castle “gives him”, not participating in the discussion at all. It is possible he feels so unfavorably toward the politician coming to see him because after his wife left him (a pointless bit of exposition we got through – hey! – dialogue) he didn’t have to share the drugs with anyone. Except the lady he was in bed with at the beginning of the movie – apparently not his wife (unless they’re doing a Cox-and-Jordan thing)? Whoever she is, she makes his “waah I am divorced and lonely” crap seem kinda exaggerated.

As I write this, I have only seen the first hour of the movie. Twice. TOK Teacher had us watch it all period with a sub and then decided we should start it over so she could pause it and we could discuss it. I made an effort to pay attention the first day, but the second day I lay on the floor, used Duckie as a pillow, spaced out and accidentally kicked Monica/banged my head on her desk for an hour. (Monica is a very patient person when it comes to being kicked.)

The other great thing about this movie is the abundance of possible comparisons that can be made to Manos: The Hands of Fate, the worst movie in existence. (It is because I have seen this movie at least 10 times that I can sit through Mind Walk without stabbing myself or becoming comatose.) From the painfully dull dialogue in a car, to credits over bland landscape, to repetitive dialogue, to the obnoxious daughter, to a completely pointless young couple to rusty old torture devices – Mind Walk is what Manos would be if Hal Warren grew weed (“that’s deeeeeeep, man”) instead of sold fertilizer (“this STINKS, man!”). If you didn’t get this paragraph, go find Manos: The Hands of Fate and watch it – get the MST3K version unless you have a very high tolerance for suckage. It’s something every human should experience, no joke. I’m willing to lend it out to those of you who know me in real life.

I love my TOK class and my TOK teacher… this movie just sucks a lot. I think IB makes us watch awful movies (Inherit the Wind, anyone? dame el religion de tiempo viejo, era bueno para David pequeno!) to unite us in irritation and inside jokes. Because that unity is what gets us through the hard times. Speaking of hard times, I have to go fill out CAS sheets, senior reflection, Haverford application, and do hours of homework. You should go watch Manos.

IBureaucracy Paper

IB is a bureaucracy in the purest sense of the word, a fact that becomes more and more obvious the more enmeshed one becomes in the web of red tape, required steps, buzzwords and confusion (a large reason IB seniors grow so close to each other and their teachers… we’re essentially all hostages of the giant IBureaucracy). IB has the ability to take very good things and turn them into very bad things. It also has the ability to take very simple things and make them excessively complicated.

I am talking about paper. That thin, flat stuff made of dead ground up trees. Most non-IB outsiders (the equivalent of Hogwarts muggles; “normals” or “regulars” to us) have the luxury of taking paper for granted. IB kids, on the other hand, understand that paper is actually a life or death issue. It is yet another part of the painful burden of knowledge IB bestows upon us.
IB paper is an entirely different breed of paper. It’s all in Spanish, English, and French, for one thing. How can a paper be in languages? Because it has instructions on it. Why would paper need instructions? Because it is complex beyond the point that any piece of paper should ever be.

It’s a weird size. Why? I don’t think even the IBO knows. It just is. It’s bright white with blue lines on it, but very different from the white and blue looseleaf we’ve been using for the last twelve years, and it’s also somewhat smoother and thicker. IB elves in Switzerland make it out of mandrake roots. The lines are inside a rectangle set in the center of the paper, allowing for pristine margins which serve no purpose except to not be written in. Writing in the margins is against the rules. Apparently that’s part of the test, because if they really cared about not having written-in margins, they could have made the lines go much closer to the edges. Above the lined rectangle is the special section for putting your special secret IB information, like your candidate number, which is also presumably part of the test since they change it every year and give you barcode stickers for your papers anyway.

That’s right – IB kids have their own barcode stickers. If you’ve never had your own personal barcode sticker, it’s one of the strangest feelings ever. You know what has barcode labels? Cans of peas. And all those meaningless scraps of paper, parts of packaging and receipts that mean nothing to humans except “this is part of The System”. Then kids get bored and start sticking their extra stickers on their necks; which doesn’t really help the creepy factor.

And that’s just the paper for writing on. IB graph paper has green lines with a grid size roughly the same as that of a screen door. I’ve used it for a few math assignments and ended up giving up on scales and counting the little squares and decided to just eyeball the stupid thing and make a line that looked right. I’d be worried about how to graph on the exams but honestly, I have no idea how they expect anyone to grade it accurately. I bet they use the same “does it look kinda right? okay.” system we do. Or a microscope, in which case I’m screwed.

I know all this, not because IB is liberal with its paper distribution – blank papers enter the Test Center sealed in bulletproof plastic to prevent Contamination – but because our teachers make Xerox copies of the paper for us to use on tests so we can “get used to it” and not “be scared of it on the test”. When your paper is so bizarre that IB kids (who really aren't fazed by anything) have to be allowed to approach it slowly in a safe and familiar environment like new zoo animals – congratulations, you’re officially the most inane bureaucracy in existence.

To top it all off, IB, in its spirit of “internationalism”, decided that the best way to be “internationalistic” was to set an “international” standard, universally uniting every single IB school with something that nobody in any of the countries uses. (I guess it brings us together by giving us something to have in common – the fact that we all have no clue.) Instead of sending staplers to those few remaining staplerless countries (apparently Kyrgyzstan and Brazil are the last anti-stapler holdouts), they decided that everybody was going to attach multiple exam papers with things called “toggles”, made out of plastic and yarn, once again finding a way to make a very simple task as complicated and bizarre as possible. There is only one other historically documented use of “toggles” – some ancient bone ones were found in the tomb of young King Tut, possible evidence that he may have been the first IB student and also a clue regarding the cause of his early death.

Also this week: happy birthday to myself!