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!