Blog Action Day

http://www.blogactionday.org/

Happy Blog Action Day!

This year's topic is the environment. I'm not going to try and relate this to IB by poking fun at how much paper our teachers use or anything like that. All I can really say about this issue is:

ARE YOU KIDDING ME, PEOPLE?

Why is the environment even an "issue" we're raising awareness for? It should not be, and I will tell you why.

IT SHOULD MATTER TO YOU ALREADY.

It's a travesty that they had to choose this as the topic for BAD. There are plenty of issues out there that do need attention from the public, but this should not be one.

Guess what?

YOU LIVE ON EARTH.

You drink water, you need medicine, you breathe air, you live in a house. There is no possible way you can twist this issue to be selfish and not care about it. But I want to drive an SUV! Would you like to be able to breathe in a year?

Here are a list of semi-understandable (not justified, per se, but that make sense) reasons not to be a huge activist for many causes:

You are not an orphan in Africa.

You are not a political prisoner.

You are not a member of a religion persecuted by your government.

You do not have cancer or AIDS.

You are not serving in Iraq.

You are not gay.

You are not mentally ill.

You are not a drug addict.

You are not a chicken, pig, or cow that somebody plans to eat.

Etc.

It's altruistic to be an activist for a cause that does not "directly" involve you. Now, I believe that as children of one God and members of the human race, we have a responsibility to take care of each other, and that every single one of us should be doing as much as they can to help every cause I listed and more. But I'm not here to be idealistic or judgmental. I'm here to say that if you don't care about the environment, you're an idiot in denial. It's not even selfish to not recycle or to litter or do other things that hurt the environment. True, it's selfish to buy Starbucks with money that could have gone to an African school, but in our humanity and our culture, nobody's saying it's wrong. What I cannot fathom, absolutely cannot fathom, is people not caring about the Earth.

There's activism in what's seen as the WWJD-hippy-love-protest-altruistic sense - and there's activism in the SAVE YOUR OWN BUTT sense. Don't shy away from being an environmentalist just because other forms of activism seem like too much effort. Running away from a fire is a good idea, even if most people who run all the time do a lot of training work. It's not that hard, really, and it's going to help you a lot more in the long run.

I'm not going to hit you with warnings or statistics. We all know the Earth is in trouble. Step up and do something.

People need to stop being pseudo-selfish idiots, and then maybe next year we can get to a cause that should be the source of an awareness day, like, oh, I don't know, advocacy for the mentally ill, or helping the lost and discouraged, or Ugandan children.

DO SOMETHING:

Greenpeace International

The Nature Conservancy

National Wildlife Federation

The Sierra Club

The Conservation Fund

IB Arts & Crafts

Remember this post about the Psych in-class project? Well Roi and I teamed up again for a stunningly apathetic and mediocre take on a Spanish origami assignment. We're learning imperatives (commands), so Spanish Teacher had us get with partners and give each other directions for origami penguins and fish. Our penguin came out relatively alright considering it's the lamest origami design ever (it's really only recognizable because we decorated it); except that we did it backwards so it doesn't have wings. The fish, on the other hand, is totally wrong. We gave up on the Spanish instructions (which Rubix later pointed out were the same as the penguin with one variation) and improvised our own idea of an origami fish, then drew on it so it looked kinda-sorta-maybe-a-little-bit like a fish. I should have taken a photo of Meg and Geo's perfectly done one. We were supposed to write something about the imperative tense on ours. On the fish I wrote "El imperativo es en la tercera persona" ("the imperative is in the third person" - that's what ST said but I learned that in English Lit, saying "you..." is second person. Whatever. Feel free to comment and explain.) On the penguin Roi wrote "Mi nombre es Margarita." ("My name is Margarita." Has nothing to do with the imperative.) I don't think they were graded. Haha.

Margarita the penguin, chilling with my waterbottle and ST's boombox that she uses to play "Gasolina" for us.

IB Bored

The above is a comic Roi and I were collaborating on during class. (I won't say which one in case any teachers read this. heh.) The hangman games at the top are unfinished because we guessed them correctly after only a few letters. Hangman isn't as much fun with someone you share a brain with. (They say "something wonderful", "on sprocken", and "origami penguin". Yes - I guessed "on sprocken" after just one letter. It's scary.)

We (Roi and I) were discussing a movie we watched in TOK called The Power Of Nightmares, about the rise of NeoCons in America and Islamic Fundamentalists in the Middle East. I commented that it would be a ridiculously awesome wake-up call to the White House if they woke up one morning and all of America's citizens had just gotten fed up and bailed and gone to Canda/Europe/etc. We were laughing at the image of a collective America saying "We're sick of this!" and just walking out, like a sexy girlfriend slamming the door on an irresponsible boyfriend. Unfortunately, Roi noted, most of the South would insist that our government really doesn't mean it, and that they really do love us, and they'd stay.

So I illustrated the conversation with a sketch of the White House and a thought bubble that says "WTF where'd everyone go" and a stick person holding aloft a Confederate flag yelling "AH'M STILL HURR". That was all it took.

In case you can't read it:

The Candadian flag is thinking "When did we become the new America? Eff! Eh?"

Mexican flag: "Still not happy..." "Oh, the irony."

Confederate flag: "You can't make me leave!"

Hammer & Sickle: "PWNED."

Union Jack: "We knew they'd be back. Private healthcare too much for ya?"

Chinese flag: "GO COMMIES!"

Australian flag: "WTF mate? ^^" (if you don't get this joke, you're a failure at the internet.)

Libyan flag: "Can we have a cooler flag please?" (in-joke from Psych last year)

Oh, and don't even think you know what's with the turtle.

Just try and imagine... two high schoolers get bored in class and start passing a note. Is it about a cute guy? The boring factor of the lesson? Plans for the weekend?

No.


It's political cartoons.

Welcome to IB.

IB Victim Support

Today they (the proverbial They, of “The System") handed out a flyer for an IB parent support group. Now, something has to be pretty rough when they have a support group for “parents of…”

But, uh, where’s our support group? Seriously, folks.

It would be more like an addiction meeting than a cancer support group – after all, as victimized as we make ourselves out to be, we did this to ourselves. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and now we hate it - but we’re in so deep it’d be equally painful to quit.
Here’s how it would go:

Hi, I’m Sal.
Hi, Sal.
I first heard about IB as a kid, in elementary school. I started slow, you know, Pre-IB in middle school. Nobody thinks it’s such a big deal – I mean lots of middle schoolers do honors classes, and it’s not much extra work. It was actually kinda fun when I first started.
Then in high school I started hitting the harder stuff. It was just a natural step from Pre-IB, I guess. They told me I could quit anytime; it would always be a choice. It doesn’t feel like a daily choice anymore.
Understanding nods.
I knew it would be hard, and you’d always be at risk for losing your diploma. I’d seen kids get into that stuff and lose their boyfriends, their families, their social lives, their jobs, everything. All they did was IB. I knew what it did, how it made you lose sleep and everything. I knew, I knew! I don’t understand what made me decide to start it. Maybe it was the pressure – all my friends were doing it - even the teachers made it sound so awesome.
I don’t know why I started. It’s just so hard to quit! It’s eaten up my life… if I left, where would I go? All my friends and all my classes are IB. I still like the high, I do… the TOK class, the kids, the teachers, the feeling of accomplishment… I’m just sick of the crashes. The times I wonder if it’s really all worth it in the end, or when the work gets to be too much. I don’t know how much more I can take.
Muted clapping.

Wow. That was a moving story. Thanks for sharing. Stay strong, sister! We believe in you.
Amen!

Next meeting is Thursday at 3am – no whining, you’ll all be up anyway.
Begrudging nods.
Remember to tell your parents about the support group for them. Topics will include “Calculus and Cold Chicken: When They Just Can’t Come Down To Dinner”, “Clarifying Condoned CAS: What Counts, What’s Copulation” and “Computer Time: They Have An EE To Do, So Shut Up And Live Without It Or Buy Another One, Cheapskates”. [Note: The second talk topic has been canceled due to lack of interest. Apparently parents of IB kids don’t worry too much about their kids having sex.]

Disclaimer: Okay, so IB is slightly more enjoyable than a meth addiction. And we do have a pretty solid support system in our fellow students and teachers. This bitter nature of this post is brought to you by sponsors Extended Essay, CAS, TOK Perception Essay, and Bio Lab. Blaargh.

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!”

IB, therefore I BS

Announcement: Updating schedule is now Mondays and Thursdays. EXCITING!!!

Ok, readers, here’s your assignment for today.
1.) Design an experiment you can carry out with materials and knowledge accessible to a high school student.
2.) Come up with a way that your experiment affects the world.
3.) Work that “global impact” into the “purpose statement” of your baking-soda-volcano lab write-up.

That’s what we’re expected to do from now on with all our labs. There’s a saying among us IBers that says “IB, therefore I BS.” It’s true that we get pretty good at coming up with pretentiously intelligent-sounding nonsense, or at re-wording lowbrow concepts so that they sound higher-level. But that’s usually the result of our own desire to take shortcuts and not the absurdly impossible nature of the assignment.

This requirement is essentially a command to BS something. You’ll note it does not say “design an experiment that affects the world.” It says “figure out a way to spin some aspect of your experiment so that it may possibly be written to hypothetically affect the world.”
Think about the labs we’re doing. If you could cure cancer, end terrorism, or bring about world peace by looking at pond scum under microscopes, don’t you think the IB class of 06 (1806, that is) would have figured it out? Maybe the secret to a stable economy can be found right under an eggshell – just dissolve it in vinegar! It just hasn’t been noticed for centuries because we’re all too busy playing with the shell-less squishy bouncy eggs (which, by the way, is insanely fun).

But instead of writing up that lab and getting the lesson on osmosis that it was designed for, I’m too busy thinking up what it has to do with bird flu in Asia. Nothing. It has nothing to do with tea in China or bird flu in Asia or any other “global impact”! It’s an egg that was soaked in vinegar!
Lately I’ve had a hard time distinguishing between when I actually know something, and when I’m writing a bunch of buzzwords that sound nice. Maybe that’s all “knowledge” is – making easy stuff sound important.

My bio paper: “the theory of evolution has met with resistance from some groups who believe that the story of Creation found in the first book of the Judeo-Christian Bible is literal fact.”
What I really said: “some religious people don’t think evolution is real.” Now that’s not really higher-level IB thinking, now is it? Lots of people know that. Consider also that it had very little to do with the question I was answering about the influences on Darwin’s theories (those beliefs influenced his publicizing of his theories but not really his theories). But, I got points for it.

I do that all the time in just about every class except possibly Spanish. I’m not saying all of my work is lame ideas dressed up in fancy words, just that it’s a really easy fallback.
The thing about IB is it teaches you how to do that really well – first by piling on so much work that you don’t have time to craft higher-level theories, and then by asking you to come up with things that are impossible without an extremely high BS content.

I wonder, if we all stopped and thought about how much of our work really means something compared to how much just sounds like it does – we’d reconsider a lot of what we think we’ve “learned”. But then again, maybe this skill is just as vital as being able to actually say something of importance. What does that say about the world that IB is preparing us for?
Ah. There’s the “impact on society.” Dang I’m good.

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!