To IB or not to IB ... That is the question

j07
Sat, 23 Sep 2006 20:51:37 +0000

Thanks for the feel-betters. I’m currently stuck at home on a Saturday night, though, so I really have nothing else to do!

IB Diploma kids are like the royalty of my high school in terms of how the faculty views us. Teachers literally bend over backwards to help us out when we need it. Our TOK teacher constantly rearranges her calendar and our class schedule to make sure that things aren’t due in TOK the same day that other tough projects/essays/tests occur in our other IB classes. As was brought up in a previous post, the 24 of us are like a little family (apologize for the cliche). We have all been in the same honors and pre-AP classes together since freshman year and we pretty much have a presence in each of our classes as packs. While the average class size for my high school is probably about 30 kids, all of my classes except for one this year has between 13 and 22 students. The IB coordinator of our school brings cookies and punch and other fun snacks for us to TOK every Friday. Basically, we are treated like we are the best of the best, and that is greatly appreciated.

50% of kids in my high school have trouble passing TAKS, which is the Texas assessment test required for graduation. Even in honors classes in 9th and 10th grade a fair amount of time was dedicated to reviewing for TAKS skills, which literally drove me occasionally to tears of frustration and boredom because I was so infuriated with how much of a waste my hours at school were.

There has always been a problem with “ceiling kids” in my school district. The district’s first priority is to get everybody to graduate and to pass TAKS. If there is any time, patience, or funding leftover to help the kids who have been at the top (and bored to death) since kindergarten, then so be it. However, this is usually never the case.

Implementing an IB program into a school essentially does nothing for the kids who have trouble with basic grade-level material because it is voluntary. The direct benefits of IB are in essence never marketed very well. If a student has trouble with grade-level work, there is a 0.00000001% chance that said student will choose to complete more rigorous work for a reward that is difficult to foresee.

While, like I said before, I am not in love with IB, I appreciate the fact that it does help out those kids who have always been bored and frustrated in public school. However, IB really doesn’t do anything for those other 444 except give them a group of students to admire for their intelligence/dedication or to marvel at for their blatant insanity.