IB Peanut Gallery

TOK is the quintessential IB class. We tell regulars that it's a "philosophy" to save ourselves the explanation. The majority of IB in-jokes originate in TOK class and the nature of the class allows (and even encourages) us to take an idea or a project and just run with it (for example, creating an imaginary classmate named Fidel Castro). It also helps that we have an awesome teacher (and honest I'm not just saying that because she reads this. Hi TOKT!). TOKT is the kind of teacher who's flexible and excitable, so if we come up with something we're more into than the lesson plan, she'll let things run their course and let us run wild. It's constructive, guided Montessori-style anarchy at its very best. Our assignment was to describe peanuts and let other groups try and guess which peanut was ours from our written descriptions. But some of us started personifying our peanuts and getting attached to them, so TOKT brought out boxes of markers and had us decorate our peanuts, then made a little peanut stand/stage for me to photograph them. She got really into it, encouraging the class to give their peanuts personalities and to put them on the stage "for the blog! for Sal's blog!" We had an awesome time. Here are some of the peanuts:

The peanuts on their little peanut stand/stage. The one being held is my peanut. It has a little peanut-nut thing peeking out of a hole. I gave him eyes and named him Claude.

This is Claude peeking out from his peanut house. The sparkly nail polish is mine. It turns red in the sun.

Elvis Peanut!

The orange one is sleepy.

Rubix made his peanut into a squirrel.

This is Penguin King Peanut.
Penguin King Peanut sitting on his creator's shoulder.

Roi named her peanut Mr. Angrynut and described him as "shaped like a clog, like from Holland."This is Mr. Angrynut.

I'll Bust A Cap In Yo Run-On Sentence!

Extended Essays are due tomorrow [I wrote this yesterday], so naturally I’m making good use of my time and... writing a blog for you people. Shut up, I’m taking a break.

IB kids are all smart, but similar IQs don’t mean similar minds. I gave my paper to four people (K, Roi, Monica, and Frenchie, in that order) to make editing marks, and it became a forum for idiosyncratic disagreement and one-sided debate.

It started out friendly – Monica changed a semicolon to a colon and Frenchie added “I agree”. He backed her up by re-phrasing her question of “whose?” by writing “the narrators’?” (Actually he wrote something like “narralûeez’” which I assume means narrators’. He has funny handwriting.) Roi wrote “I agree” or “Word.” under some of K’s comments.

The tone changed quickly when Frenchie wrote “Makes sense to me...” under a comment by Monica that one of my claims didn’t make sense and “uh, why not?” after Roi told me not to capitalize a word within a quotation. K changed a word, claiming that my original sounded awkward, but Frenchie asserted that “Meh, I think either word is fine”. Some verb-tense confusion led to someone mistakenly crossing out an “s”, which Frenchie circled with the assertion that “this person is dumb”. K responded to my mention of “archetypal symbols” by telling me that my discussion was more of “symbols in the setting rather than archetypes”, but Roi jumped to my defense by circling the word “river”, drawing an arrow to K’s comment and writing “archetype!” K wanted a topic sentence for a paragraph but Frenchie insisted that it was only a continuation of the previous paragraph and instead should be merged.

Ah, IB kids. Regulars throw punches, but we believe the red pen is mightier than the sword. Yo momma's so dumb, she thinks a dangling modifier is a boob job!

(Okay, that last joke was awful. I make no apologies. EE fried my brain.)

A Day In The Life = Comic Style!

With a few notable exceptions, IB places all of its emphasis on research-based learning rather than creativity. We're not expected to come up with new ideas, just to put other people's ideas together comprehensively with proper citations and credit. So, in true IBer fashion, I've stolen someone else's idea and am presenting my version of it, with appropriate credit due (but don't expect to see parenthetical documentation).
The idea came from this guy: http://www.hourlycomic.com/ who does a comic every hour; little doodles that capture the minutae of every hour in his life. I adapted the format beyond a two-panel comic and instead of "every waking hour", comicked every period in the school day.
If this gets a positive response - if you guys like it - I'll try and do it every month or so. If you all hate it, then I'll stick to my sporadically-updated writings. And if I do do it again, I promise more legible, larger writing. Apologies. Also if you click on them they'll open up bigger.

TOKT Loved This

First off, I’d like to apologize for not updating as frequently as promised. The first semester of IB was so crazy intensely busy and the second one is shaping up to be the same way... so I’ll just be updating this sporadically when I have time and ideas.

Okay, I decided when I started this blog that it would not be for ranting about all the crap we were going through at the time because I consider myself mildly intelligent and have a good grasp of action-consequence relationships as well as the vastly public nature of the web. You readers did miss out on some hilariously scathing tirades against... stuff... but anyway because of this, the introduction to this is as follows:
One day, one class was somewhat slow, and Roi and I got kind of bored, and started passing this story back and forth and adding to it. I’m the purple and she’s the red. I had a ton of fun with it; playing into all the how-not-to-write fallbacks of melodramatic and self-important romance and sci-fi (the two genres that are the easiest to suck at, imo).

Once upon a time there was a zombie robot who fell in love. His paramour was a vampire pirate wench who was fascinated by his advanced technology. One night they went walking under the moonlight. She gazed lovingly at his sparkling body under the starlight where the brilliant silver shone under the zombie rust. She knew their love could undo the damage years of oxidation had done to his heart. All of a sudden there was a FLASH of lightning!

The bolt reflected off the lightpole and struck his heart. It glowed with the energy of the storm, and sparked onto her dress. Her dress caught fire and she ran into the sea where her pirate ship waited dark and silent. The zombie robot could not follow her into the water and the heartbroken wailing beep was carried by the ocean wind to the ears of the undead werewolf waiting on the ship for his enemy the vampire pirate wench.

His crew had grown weary waiting for the impending battle; they would rejoice at the news of her return to the sea. The werewolf found pleasure in the forlorn beep of the robot’s heart, knowing he could use the robot to his advantage. Glancing back at her love, the vampire pirate wench saw him carried away by undead werewolves. She knew from his blank eyes that they had pressed his Standby button. Torn between her disabled robot zombie prince and her prized ship now swarming with enemies, she drew her sword, bared her fangs and charged into the surf toward the ship with passion in her heart and war in the rest of her. The undead werewolves frothed with anticipation as they collected their weapons and prepared for battle. When they saw their enemy approaching, they rapidly disembarked, leaving a few behind to watch the captive robot. She met them in the surf, her sword and teeth moving like celestial bodies in orbit, perfectly following through from path to target. Many werewolves went down but soon she was surrounded, outnumbered. The image of her robot love came into her head and along with it came an idea. Swiftly she replaced her sword in its scabbard and raised her hands in surrender. Soon she would be on board, close to the zombie robot.

Meanwhile, aboard the enemy vessel, the guards watching the robot had taken a break to watch the battle. One of the stray dogs aboard the ship began sniffing around the robot. He leapt onto two feet to sniff the robot’s head. In the process, he bumped the standby button. By the time the vampire pirate wench was carried aboard, the zombie robot was waiting for her on deck. Their eyes met in mutual bloodthirsty love and in a flash of fangs and lasers the werewolves released their hold, falling back from the attack in defeat. “Where is the undead werewolf leader?” she asked him, glancing around the ship, empty save for the bodies of incapacitated werewolves strewn about the deck.
“I vaporized him in the skirmish.”

She sighed, satisfied in the clanking, angular arms of her hero. A cool sea breeze billowed through the sails and made her cape ripple like the waters beneath. A ray of sunlight appeared on deck and in the misty dawn the werewolves morphed back into harmless canines. With the robot as first mate, she sailed the ship to a deserted island, where she released the pack of canines. Afterward, they returned to her ship to decide their future.