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.

Yes, I did say that. Just a moment ago, in fact.

SUPER DUPER apologies for not updating in almost a month. Been swamped with IAs and xperis and such. Anyway, on to the post:

Since Bro is a wrestler and I need CAS hours, I tutor the wrestling team for an hour after school two days a week. Not many of the wrestlers are IB kids, and in talking with them, I’ve discovered that IB kids and wrestlers speak completely different languages. I’m constantly expecting to get an answer characteristic of my IB friends only to be shocked when I am met with a completely different response.

Me: This is okay, but shouldn’t it be longer?
IB Kid: Yeah, this is just a rough draft. Do you think I should go into more detail in the second paragraph?
Wrestler: THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID

Me: I think you have your periods in the wrong places. I marked them in red.
IB Kid: Thanks!

Wrestler: *hysterical laughter*

Me: If you would just shut your mouth for a minute please!
IB Kid: You’re constructing a straw man fallacy; I’m just pointing that out!
Wrestler: THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID

Me: A word that rhymes with “work”? How about “shirk”?
IB Kid: Hmm, let’s fit that into my iambic pentameter.
Wrestler 1: What does that mean?
Wrestler 2: You know, like “shirk chicken”.

Me: See, that curvy part doesn’t come up high enough.
IB Kid: Wait, how again do you tell if it’s a sine or a cosine graph?
Wrestler: THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID

Me: That line has too many syllables.
IB Kid: Oh, yeah. Oops.
Wrestler: THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID
Me: that doesn’t even make any sense.
Wrestler: THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID

Me: Okay, I’m leaving now.
Wrestler: THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID

Me: Are you surprised?

And then there’s the infamous rubber-band ball dialogue. I realize that my questions seem completely inane, but keep this in mind: I’m used to IB kids, who have conversations like this:

Me: What’s that?
Roi: It’s a rubber-band ball that I made since I was TAing for LAT for CAS because I don’t have a seventh hour, and she didn’t have grading for me to do because her freshmen are all doing presentations, and she had this box of rubber-bands because she bought them for her freshman to do a project that she decided not to have them do because their presentations are taking too long, so I made the rubber-band ball, see how high it bounces?

So, I was a little dumbstruck at Wrestler’s answers and trying to prompt him into my type of conversation during this exchange:

Me: What’s that?
Wrestler: A rubber-band ball.
Me: Where’d you get it?
Wrestler: I made it.
Me: Out of what?
Wrestler: .............rubber bands.
Me: Where’d you get them?
Wrestler: .....A box of rubber bands.
Me: ...Oh.

Which, of course, led to the surrounding wrestlers laughing at me, which led to the teacher supervisor asking what was going on, which led to me saying this:
“I was just asking Wrestler about his ball.”

Which, of course, led to a collective THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID!!!

IB Thankful For:

Not your typical list but hey, we take whatever we can get in IB.

~Not doing dissections the day before Thanksgiving

~A Calculus test the day before the long weekend (no homework!)

~G-2 Pens that let you see how much ink you’re using – the only thing anymore that gives me a sense of accomplishment

~Freshman brothers to bring things to school that you/your friends forgot

~The school grading system crash in first quarter that allows “It’s probably the computer – let me talk to [Teacher] on Monday” as an excuse for every bad grade

~IB Juniors to remind us that there was a time when we felt hopeful and driven too

~Teachers like PT who help us navigate the bureaucracy by copying IB paper, hitting us over the head with things like CEGM and Ethics guidelines, and generally being on our side

~Wikipedia’s endless link-chain that allows us to entertain ourselves while still feeling/appearing productive

~ IB workdays – the closest thing we get to having a social life

~Lockers halfway across campus that force us to get fresh air and exercise

~And all of you wonderful beautiful people who read this! Happy Thanksgiving!

In IB, Cigars Are Never Really Cigars

IB kids just think differently than the rest of the population. We have “higher level critical thinking skills”. What that really means is that we can use metaphor to relate almost every concept to sex.
In LA, every book can be summarized in one short sentence containing the word “bang”.
“Oedipus killed his dad and banged his mom.”
“Hamlet basically wanted to bang his mom, but he also wanted to bang Ophelia, but then everyone died.”
“Emily killed her husband and kept him around to bang. Necrophilia ftw.”
“Kurtz lived in this weird hut with skulls and a random black lady he liked to bang.”

Biology… you know what? I’m not going to bother. Here’s a picture of the “enzyme lock-and-key model”. Go crazy.

In Spanish today, Roi and I were having trouble translating a sentence. It sounded like it said “Nobody in the class got done” or “Nobody in the class did anybody”. We asked Sna to translate, and she told us it meant “Nobody in the class did it”. Well, the idea had already been planted, so Roi and I cracked up at the translation. In front of the whole class. I think we’ve almost blown our cover as fourteen-year-old boys in disguise.

TOK opens up a lot of open-ended discussion. We close off those ends by talking about SEX. Our discussion on the privacy of perception hinged on the example of “two people having…the same… experience… at the same time… together… but not really… feeling the same thing… together.” An introductory activity on perception using inkblots led one of us to blurt that one of the inkblots looked like “a giant penis with a hole in it.” Apparently when we’re talking about perception, the easiest conclusion to draw is that we perceive SEX in just about everything.

Psychology is almost too easy. So Roi and I took it to the next level. Think about this for a minute:
1.) Freud got a lot of his theories from psychoanalyzing himself.
2.) Freud came up with the theory of phallic symbols.
3.) Freud originally wanted to research the reproductive systems of eels.
4.) Freud started a club of men who sat around and smoked cigars together.
Conclusion: Freud liked men, including Carl Jung, who split with him not over “theories” but when he got tired of being a booty call.

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.