IB Dysfunctional Diversity

IB kids are a pretty diverse bunch and we all take it in stride. Of course, for IB kids, the definition of “stride” is something along the lines of “skip-hop-crawl-stumble-halt-sprint”. So when I say we take our diversity in stride, what I really mean is that we have forged an obscene, tolerant, offensive, and loving bond based on it. Like I mentioned earlier, IB kids are close enough and intelligent enough to come up with plenty of in-jokes and labels that seem terribly off-color to an uninitiated regular but are everyday banter to us.

~Like the time Stealth and a friend made a ton of paper airplanes and threw them at a Japanese girl on Pearl Harbor Day, asking her “how do you like it?”
~Or the claim that our IB class has “two real Jews” made by combining the four “half-Jews”.
~We’ve known each other for 4+ years and yet we all continually mix up the names of two of the Indian boys (who are referred to collectively as “The Indians”). We also can’t get straight the similar names of a girl from Afghanistan and Goa.
~The “matching factor”, which means that the entire class is going to insist that people will make a good couple if they are both the same color.
~People who’ve known each other for 4+ years being shocked every time a black girl says she is Jewish.
~Constant harassment of one kid for rides, paper, gum, etc. because he is “loaded”.
~Insistence after the mock trial that I become an on-call lawyer for one of the Indian boys because “he’s brown and could get arrested any minute!”
~We have a girl who’s a real big feminist, so Stealth enjoys making posters for class presentations about how women belong in the kitchen. The boys will also ask each other ~“Hey, you know what’s a great joke? Women’s rights.” Once I edited her paper and she had stapled the pages all messed up so I wrote “as a woman, you should have better secretarial skills! These pages are all out of order!” She was going to harm me, so I told her Stealth told me to write it.
~“Of course Rubix is brilliant. He’s Asian.”
~“How do you have a C in [class]? [Teacher] is [ethnicity] and so are you!”
But then again, it’s not all one-sided. I learned the hard way that if an Indian kid tells you something in Hindi to go say to the other Indian kids, it’s probably not “Can I borrow some paper please?”

The cool thing is that we all think it’s funny and none of it is out of malice. The other cool thing is that we stay really far away from the real racism we heard around us, which where we live is mostly directed towards Hispanics and Muslims.

IN OTHER NEWS:
I pressed the [submit] button on my college application to my dream college, Haverford! Scariest moment of my life. Wish me luck!

Me: Frenchie, your backpack looks all misshapen.
Frenchie: That’s because of the stuff that I just put in it.
Me: …I know that. I’m not an idiot.

Frenchie: Then how come you said something so obvious? “Your backpack looks like it has stuff in it.” /“That’s because it does!”/ “Well duh, I’m not dumb!” That’s the conversation we just had.

WGA Strike

Alright, so, I promised myself that since I use every other aspect of my life and my writing as a soapbox, I would use this to entertain you guys and keep my opinions to... well, everywhere else. And you'll all notice that I didn't post anything during NAMI's week.

But this is important; and it's also relevant to this blog because:

~this is the beginning of my writing-for-people-to-actually-read career.

~as IB kids, we know a lot about intellectual property and wanting to get credit for our hard work, as well as the consequences of plaigarism. In fact, when I was deciding whether or not I wanted to jump into this big program, the biggest "whoah, what?" factor was the IB agreement that whatever I wrote for my Extended Essay and other send-it-to-IB-stuff became theirs.

So, without further ado:

The Hollywood writers are on strike. And honestly you guys, don't let the word "Hollywood" fool you. These are not actors wanting to make another three billion dollars per movie. If you watch the short informational video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ55Ir2jCxk you'll see that this is a truly worthy cause.

Here http://unitedhollywood.blogspot.com/ is the "unofficial grassroots blog" of the strike, and if you spend some time on it you can watch a videos of The Office and Grey's Anatomy cast members and writers picketing and being hilarious, and you can also see photos of Scrubs, Desperate Housewives, and more cast members and writers picketing. More videos here: http://www.youtube.com/wgaamerica

Okay, so what can we do about it? This is also where IB comes in. Most of us love our TV shows (Roi - Desperate Housewives, Meg - Grey's Anatomy, Me - Scrubs/The Office) but our crazy schedules don't allow for watching them on tv, so we watch them online or on DVD.

Oops?

I, for one, am refusing to watch TV online until this gets resolved. Maybe if the networks start losing the ad revenue from these "promos" (ha!) they'll see how important that money is (not only to them!) and that the people are behind this movement. Also, the United Hollywood blog has a petition we can sign and will soon be letting us know how we as viewers can make our feelings known to the networks.

Misery Loves Company

An IA is an Internal Assessment – something you work your butt off, your teacher grades, the IBO gnomes audit, and then they take your firstborn child away. That’s how they get new IBO gnomes. Most IB kids don’t have firstborn children, so the IBO gnomes take our scores instead.

Anyway, Internal Assessments. Last year we were doing them for Psych and PT went over the ethical rules three million times. The IBO’s ethical rules regarding animals are stricter than PETA, which sucks because our original idea was to light hamsters on fire and throw them at people. Come to think of it, we probably would have gotten a better grade with that. (Are you sensing some bitterness on my part regarding IAs?) But their guidelines about people are basically YOU CANNOT STRESS THEM OUT ON PURPOSE. YOU CANNOT STRESS THEM OUT ON ACCIDENT. YOU CANNOT STRESS THEM OUT.
At the time, when PT was making sure she had said this to us every minute of every class period we were working on our IAs, I thought it was silly. Why would we stress people out on purpose?

Now, I realize, there’s a reason IB is so worried about it. Apparently sleep deprivation, high stress levels and four years in IB have a negative effect on the psyche. (Who knew?) And by now, we’re the psychological Hannibal Lectors of high school. We’ve suffered and we want everyone else to feel the crushing pain of a stress-maxed all nighter.

How did I come up with this theory? We’re working on another IA in bio about heart rates. My partner and I, despite both having been in Psych last year and getting the IB rules drilled into our heads hundreds of times, decided we wanted to test the effects of stress on heart rate. And not just any stress. We wanted to make lists of faked “stats” about college admissions, one with horribly stressful stats (90% of college students are unhappy with their dorm room, 80% are not at their first choice college, etc.) and another one with the same stats only reversed. We planned to ‘debrief’ the participants afterwards and tell them the stats were made up. But when we asked whether it was “ethical”, PT asked us if we were pod people replacing kids who had actually been in her class. Well, she didn’t actually ask that. But her face said it all.
The thing is, we knew it was completely unethical from the start. It was only a fantasy. Which leads me to two conclusions:

1.) Subconsciously, we’re sadists who want to see regulars endure the same stress we do
2.) Subconsciously, we’re masochists who wanted to get a zero on that IA, thus denying ourselves our diplomas.

Good evening, Clarice.

IB Justice

We did a mock trial of the Rosenberg case in History class today. Here’s how things go down in court with IB kids at the wheel.

The bailiff, dressed in combat boots, a leather jacket, mirrored aviators and a cowboy hat, opened up and, we all rose for Honorable Judge Roi. She looked quite judge-like in a black robe HT had in his closet (which, contrary to her pre-trial anxiety, did not appear to be crawling with lice). The effect was lost when she got to the podium and proceeded to announce that she could not find “her paper”. The court reporter located it on the floor.

Prosecution called their first witness, who was sworn in on a copy of The Communist Manifesto that he would “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me Mr. History Teacher.” A short recess was called when said witness refused to take the stand because there was “something funky on the seat” and a jury member came down to replace the offending chair. Judge Roi restored order by banging a - ball-peen hammer? what was that thing? – on HT’s Far Side daily calendar. She then threw out a perfectly legitimate hearsay objection (haha no bitterness here!)

I was a lawyer for the defense. My co-counselor Rubix and I prepared so well for some objections that we wowed (read: annoyed) the crowd with synchronized objections. My other co-counselor, Duckie’s Friend (he needs a new nickname) in Stealth’s shirt (two sizes too big), black basketball shorts, and a leg brace, was instrumental in, well, in distracting my clients from the fact that they’ve already been sentenced to death. But then he didn’t really have anything to do today.

Monday: Defense presents their case! DUN DUN DUNNNNN

Things I Learned In IB

Despite its best effort, IB is really educational! Here are a few things I have learned:

1.) Hindu = religion. Hindi = language.

2.) There is no Hindi birthday song.

3.) Most Hindus are vegetarians.

4.) If you offer a vegetarian chicken, they will not eat it.

5.) When trying to distinguish between American and Asian Indians, the clarification is not best made by saying "Indians with dots or Indians with feathers?" while pointing to your head.

6.) If you are male, it is less "gay" to have a Bollywood male movie star as your phone wallpaper than a Hollywood male movie star.

7.) "INDIA is in ASIA, people! Why is this so hard?"

8.) You WISH you were invited to wild Indian-only parties.

9.) You tried to copy something in the Hindi alphabet? You did it all wrong.

10.) Indians do not consider the Kama Sutra to be their greatest contribution to global stability.

11.) You cannot imitate an Indian accent. Don't even try.

IB Word Games

I'm not entirely sure how I should go about explaining these. The short version is: We were bored.
Long version: My calc class is combined into AB and BC. Two classes, one teacher. IB kids find creative enough ways to get into trouble when the teacher is constantly paying attention - now imagine what it's like when you put together juniors and seniors who've know each other for years now, into a last-hour class, and add one overworked and distracted teacher. The lassiez-faire classroom management means that, well, lots of "stuff" goes down in calc class. It's the red-light district of IB classes. (Last year there was penny melting, mace spraying, hand-sanitizer burning, and general mischief and mayhem.) Now I don't mean for this blog to get Calc Teacher in trouble. It's not that she condones any of this or that she sucks at keeping us under control. We're just all nuts and she can only deal with one class for about 1/3 of the time (the other 2/3 spent with the other class or at her desk doing teacher stuff). And, to her credit, HS has really high math scores and to my knowledge there have been no fatalities as a direct result of her class.

Anyway, if the class is that self-determined when she's around, we're a million times worse when we have a sub. (I have a suspicion that her sub notes said something like "pass out worksheet, then duck and cover"). On the last sub day, we got bored translating words into as many languages as possible (I think our record was "water" - we got it in 17 different languages just from one classroom of IB kids) and noticed someone had already messed with the Objectives board. Every day CT writes "Obj.: I will" and then whatever we're doing. The board said:

Obj: I will do well on the test. We changed this to "I will do sucky. Welcome to the test." (the idea was to change as little as possible about the original sentence but change the meaning completely - here all we changed was the "l on" to "come to"). I like the ominous sound of it.

Obj: I will graph f, f' and f" We changed this to "I will graph fluffy fish". Then it was whimsically illustrated but my only photos of that have people's faces in them.
Obj: I i t t ti tit ti ...some comedian erased all the Calc AB objective to be nonsensical and presumably sexual (this was the origin of the "let's mess with the objectives board" because my friends and I felt it needed to be fixed). We managed to change it to "Objects will not rest until" but couldn't figure out a word that had "tit_ti". Frenchie commented that he was "pretty sure that some objects do rest until titti" and offered an example; we declined. Goa walked by (she was off doing her worksheet or something dumb) and said it was "substitution". We all felt dumb, then finished the sentenced with "institutionalization of sock".
The head and hand in the second photo belong to Rubix.

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.