IB Mature?

I’ve mentioned before how IB kids are in a lot of ways more immature than our peers, or at least more creative and enthusiastic about our immaturity. A lot of us are younger than we ought to be for seniors (skipped grades), and a lot of us kind of missed out on the experience of being stupid little kids because – you may be familiar with this concept from various sitcoms – oftentimes advanced intellects come with less competent social skills. The government says some of us can vote/join the army and most of us can drive; the school system says we are now responsible for choosing and applying to the perfect college as well as saving the world with our bio labs; many of us have jobs – and yet we’re all essentially just seven year olds who can differentiate functions, as illustrated by the Homecoming assembly.

Yesterday Roi and I were at our job (tutoring first graders in reading) and we had to do things a little differently because we needed to give our kids a pre-test to measure their progress through the year. However, because we have such little ones, we needed to take them out of our groups and test them one at a time over reading sight words. We came up with a brilliant plan – combine our groups so one of us can teach all the kids (about 12, since another tutor was gone that day) and one of us can take their kids out individually to test them. When I say “brilliant plan”, I mean that in a “Let’s spy on the Democrats!” way.
Yesterday, Roi and I learned a very important lesson. If you disrupt the routine of first graders by introducing a new situation, person, game, etc. – they become as manageable as rabid gophers. The testing took less than ten minutes, but we spent the remainder of the hour chasing after the kids, yelling over them, pulling them out from under bookshelves, confiscating toys, breaking up brawls, and getting tackled. Geo and another first-grade tutor combined their groups to do the same thing, with the same effects. It didn’t help that Roi and I found the antics exceedingly hilarious and so we were yelling at them to stop while laughing. Fun fact – if you laugh at something a kid does, s/he will continue the behavior, no matter how many times you punctuate your laughter with “quiet mouths please! Let’s all sit down!”

Tonight is the Homecoming game so this morning we had a pep assembly (I have a separate blog about that) between second and third hours. That meant that all the classes today began and ended at weird times. That routine disruption, coupled with leftover “pep” from the assembly, made us about as manageable as, well, rabid gophers. We spent History class playing Cold War jeopardy on the computer. Usually History jeopardy games are slightly tense (IBers are competitive about everything) and mostly just an opportunity to sleep/do other homework when it’s not your turn to stand at the front and not know the answer. Today, on the other hand, we spent the hour banging on desks, cheering, yelling, Middle-Eastern war whooping (Nahidface, help me out here, what’s it called?), and generally reacting to the Jeopardy game with passion rivaling Superbowl fans. We got into TOK and found a giant pile of Play-Doh containers and insisted on getting to play with them (even though they weren’t meant for our class). Rubix made a supercool dinosaur, unfortunately I didn’t have my camera on me. TOK Teacher tried to teach but we mutinied and demanded a “free period”, so she surrendered to the insanity and gave us a little kinesiology demonstration and let us loose. It was boffo!
Lesson for today? IB kids are just as bad as first graders. Throw off our routine, and we jump from zombies to Chihuahuas on crack and make it impossible for anything to get accomplished. We like Play-Doh, dinosaurs, and yelling.

Oh, and speaking of obnoxious immaturity, this has to be shared:
The Speech team has a sort of rivalry with the team we were playing, so even though I know nothing about football, I was being as annoyingly spirited as possible at the game. Then I got bored with football and carried that annoying energy over into entertaining myself. For the homecoming game, everyone dressed up in “crazy black and gold” to be supportive, and I had a gold sash tied around my waist. I wrapped it around my hand and shouted “hey everybody look – sash knuckles!”