#middle years program

Would anyone mind filling out this form for my MYP personal project?

Its a play centered around five gods (Egyptian [Ra], Greek [Zeus], Aztec [Tezcatlipoca], Japanese [Izanagi] and Norse [Odin]) and their creation myths told through a comical lens. I need to get sum feedback so if any of you have like half an hour to spare I'd be grateful !!

This essay is motivated by this TEDx Talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZVxA0J5g28

This is mostly a stream-of-consciousness writing, so please forgive any disconnected thoughts, awkward transitions, or weird grammar (especially the last one, since I usually pride myself on being much more thorough in my writing and editing, whereas here I am essentially doing a lot of writing and no editing at all).

I went to preschool and kindergarten about an hour from home. My dad took me with him to the city every day. He went to work, and I went to begin my life. The school I went to was actually another part of the company he worked for. I assume they had some kind of interdepartmental deal going on. “Bring your child to our school for a pay raise,” or something. Thus were spent the first two years of the rest of my life. At the time, I could spell the word “academic” backwards and forwards but didn’t know how it related to me. At the time, the only “rigor” I ever experienced was trying to avoid the broccoli at lunch. At the time, my greatest achievement that I identified as academic was being able to count to one hundred.

We would get visits from local intellectuals, who taught us interesting things about the world. I always loved these visits; I loved learning about the solar system, or African wildlife, or how telephones work. Yes, the school I was at considered these appropriate topics for us four- and five-year-olds. I don’t know about the other kids, but this made perfect sense to me. None of it was academic. None of it was rigorous. We didn’t get grades, or write essays, or give presentations. It was fun. I don’t know about the other kids, but at the time, I had been reading at a sixth-grade level for two years. At the time, I spoke English and Italian fluently. At the time, I could cook for myself, and it was delicious.

Somewhere between kindergarten and first grade, I lost most of those skills.

I went to a local elementary school. The place was clean and the furniture was new, and the faculty was, for the most part, amiable, and knew how to work with young children. I personally knew the principal, because she personally knew everyone. I still read constantly. Teachers often had to threaten to take away my books in class just to get me to stop, but even when they tried to surprise me with an answer I could usually get it right without even looking up from Harry Potter’s daring exploits, or...well, mostly I just read Harry Potter a lot. I got straight As every time report cards came around, because my parents insisted that I had an “A brain”, whatever that means. I took part in several extracurriculars. I took tae-kwon-do after school, which continued for several years. I played violin, trumpet, and snare in third, fourth, and fifth grade respectively. But I could no longer speak Italian, at all — my parents say that I lost interest in it as soon as I realized that the world around me was just speaking English. And I couldn’t or wouldn’t cook for myself any more. After all, that’s what I had parents for, right? Elementary school was where I discovered the truth about the world at large, and where I was told some of my first lies about it.

I was bullied pretty badly in elementary school. It was almost never physical, but the words hurt more than their ten-year-old fists could have. It’s the worst time in your life to be bullied, because you don’t have the experience to deal with it like you would in middle or high school, or college. Something about having only three real friends made me pretty vulnerable, and naïve as I was, I sought companionship. Every couple of months, I like-liked someone new. They never liked me back, of course, so I mostly daydreamed about what it would be like to find romance. In that field, I was both mature and immature. I didn’t know any of the details, but I knew that love was far more than on-and-off dating, which my peers were beginning to do. I knew that one of my life goals had to be to find the one girl who I loved and who loved me above all others.

Still working on that one.

Along with the realizations that the people in my life would not always be kind and would very often be downright moronic came the lies about my “academic career”. Number one: cursive. In third grade they taught us how to write in cursive, swearing on their college degree that from then on, we would never write in print again. In the nine years afterwards, I have since written in cursive for a total of about ten minutes.

They also told us, every year, that the teachers in the grade above would not be as forgiving as they were, and that if we wished to succeed we would have to work harder, turn things in on time, and never slack off. Not only did this turn out to be false, the exact opposite was true, a fact that has continued up to and including twelfth grade.

The last, and perhaps, most important thing I learned in elementary school was, almost certainly due to my general isolation, how much I valued and, at the same time, detested praise. My most vivid memory of playing an instrument is this, from fourth grade. An acquaintance and I were sitting next to each other in the band room, sharing a stand and music. The teacher instructed each similar pair in the room to choose one of the two parts available. Immediately I turned to my partner and asked, “Which one would you like to play?” This seemed natural to me. I was there to learn to play and play trumpet, so it didn’t matter to me what I was playing on it. But our teacher halted the class. “Did everyone hear what he just did? He just asked his partner which part she wants. That is the proper way to share music.” Part of me was glowing with pride, and part of me was hating being singled out in this way.

Only some of these new truths followed me to middle school.

Some time late in the year, all fifth graders were invited to an open house at the middle school most of them would be going to. I and my parents attended, but early in the summer, I was informed by them that I would, in fact, be going to an out-of-district middle school and joining something called the MYP, or Middle Years Programme, spelled exactly like that because goodness knows you can’t have an advanced academic program without being pretentious about it. I complained about this vigorously, but soon relented.

When I got to the MYP school, I found that only three of my colleagues from elementary had come with me there: a boy and a girl from my neighborhood, the latter of whom I had had a massive crush on for years (in addition to all my others), and another girl — let’s call them “Jake”, “Anne”, and “Wendy”. “Jake” and “Anne” and I all carpooled to school, our moms switching out the job every day. The MYP was not much different from what I had already seen of school, except that now I had no friends and knew next to no one.

The school was a mess. Not only was every wall and desk dirty and vandalized, but there was a fight nearly every other day. Very few of the teachers knew how to work with their students, and even fewer actually seemed to want to teach us anything at all. I can remember precisely two good teachers out of the thirty or so that I had there.

Just as second semester was beginning, “Jake” transferred to a private religious school. When the year ended, “Anne” transferred back to our regular feeder middle school because she was scared of the other kids here. For the next two years, it was just me and “Wendy”. I kept my desperate hopes for love to about three girls. Two of my crushes lasted about two weeks, at the start of seventh and the end of eighth grade. I was also crushing hard on “Wendy” from about the first quarter of seventh grade onward, but, of course, I never acted on any of these feelings.

As I made my way through seventh and eighth grade, the bullying — which, even though I was attending a completely different school than my original bullies, continued as if it was the same awful kids — slowed down and finally became nearly nonexistent. The people who had teased me finally got over it, and I was able to make friends and become a more active member of the school’s social scene.

In middle school, I became even more of a wallflower. I took part in absolutely no extra-curriculars except for tae-kwon-do, which was separate from the school anyway, and which I quit before the end of eighth grade.

Again, just before my time there was up, I attended an open house at what would have been my high school, were it not for the MYP, and, in the larger picture, the IB. For those of you who don’t know, the Middle Years Programme is a magnet program from sixth to tenth grade which leads into the International Baccalaureate, which purports to offer “quality education for a better world”. This is, as far as I can tell, a filthy lie, but I’ll get back to that later. The idea is that the MYP prepares you for the IB, which you are in for eleventh and twelfth grade, which prepares you for college and the world at large.

My parents slotted me onto this path because, as I was leaving elementary school, they encountered material informing them that the IB was the very best education you could give your child in order for them to be successful in the “real world”. I was not consulted about this decision, and it came as a shock to them — though not me, so much — when, by the end of eleventh grade, we discovered how truly nightmarish the IB actually is. As I said, I’ll talk more about this later.

At the time, academic rigor was not a term I was familiar with, though the two words individually had meaning. Certainly, it was not a term that could be applied to the work I was doing.

In the summer, my parents informed me that I would again be attending an out-of-district school, the feeder for my MYP middle school. I fought back for a time, and gave up soon enough. “Wendy”, however, would instead be attending another school for a different magnet program, STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Once again, I would have very few connections in the next year.

In the ninth grade, for whatever reason — I actually don’t remember — I took a Theater Arts class. I met two people there who would be my closest friends for the remainder of the year; let’s call them “Paul” and “Amy”. Paul was a freshman like me, and Amy was a senior who had just transferred there that year and would be heading back to her home state for college. I think I sort of had a crush on Amy, but not in the same way as before and after; she was the first high school senior I really knew, one of my only real friends that year, and sort of a role model. She was funny, and smart, and really enjoyable to be around. At the time I was never consciously attracted to her, but looking back I can see how my ideal partner now resembles her.

Anyway. We were all in the same Theater Arts class together, along with several other people who I tentatively called friends. The teacher was hilarious and fun, and the class was mostly just playing a lot of improv games and learning interesting things about the history of theater. Imagining “tech crew” to be as it is in fiction, with headsets and lights and sounds, I became a techie for the fall production. It turned out to be a lot of lifting things and painting, and I didn’t come back for the spring musical — although I did try out for the murder mystery dinner theater at the end of the year. Still, that was my first introduction to school theater. It was in tenth grade that it really took off.

In tenth grade, I auditioned for the fall show, The Importance of Being Earnest, and, with a silly walk and a Monty Python-style falsetto voice, I was cast as Merriman, the maid. I was the youngest member of the cast, and the fact that the juniors and seniors were all complimenting me and apparently enjoying spending time with me was overwhelming. The fact that these upperclassmen thought I had talent, thought I was funny, thought of me as a friend — it was just about too much for me to handle. I got a small part in the spring musical, as well, and suddenly, as the cast and crew quadrupled, so did my circle of friends. This was insane to me. For nine years of school I had had a very limited number of people who I trusted and cared about, and even fewer who I thought trusted and cared about me, but suddenly I was part of a community that seemed to be all about trust and care. On the stage, if you don’t have total faith in your fellow cast and crew, you can’t succeed. You cannot perform well if you aren’t confident that everyone else will perform well too. It’s just too much effort to be so worried.

Something inside me broke. I didn’t know it until eleventh grade, but I simply couldn’t handle that many people being nice to me. It sounds strange, sure, but it’s true.

Around show week of my sophomore spring musical, I developed a massive crush on a freshman — let’s call her “Sam”. I realized recently, as I mentioned, that “Sam” reminded me of “Amy”. But, you know, since I didn’t know anything about relationships, I overdid it. Hearing that she had a sort-of boyfriend, I bought her three tickets to her favorite band, as a birthday present. The idea was that she, her sort-of boyfriend, and perhaps a parent could attend. But, alas, “Sam” would be at camp that week, and returned them to me.

Unfortunately, in three months, I didn’t manage to resell them.

Now we arrive at junior year. This is where I officially joined the IB. This is where I was supposed to receive “quality education for a better world”. This is where I would learn all the skills I would need for college and the world beyond.

Let’s pause for a moment. One of the things I hated more than anything else was when teachers talked about “the real world”. That was the most — well, one of the most — crude, annoying, patronizing things I ever heard a teacher say. Of course, I knew what they meant, but the fact that they couldn’t say what they meant and instead treat us as though we lived in some fantasy universe was just insulting. Unpause.

In the IB, it was drilled into our minds that we should fit a series of “Learner Profiles”: we should be Risk-Takers, Communicators, Open-Minded, Inquirers, Thinkers, Caring, Knowledgeable, Principled, Balanced, and Reflective. At the same time, almost of all of our teachers shut down our attempts at creativity, pushed us away from true analysis, and antagonized us against them and against the IB as a whole. Our art teacher, although most people liked her, was constrained by the system, and thus so were we. In addition to the projects we had to do, every IB Art student had a notebook (the IWB, or Investigation Workbook) in which we had to research artists and art and plan for projects we did. Originally, as we had all done in previous art classes, everyone just did lots of sketches and drawings. Then we were told that we couldn’t just do sketches and drawings, and had to do research and analysis of art and artists. Then, we were told we could only make research/analysis pages if they were related to or planning for our current project. We got new projects about every three to four weeks. We had a class either two or three days a week. And we had to have a new page for every class. I don’t think that works out, mathmetically speaking.

IB History was where we were first introduced to our new essay guidelines. In the past, an essay or report was one or two pages maximum. In the IB, as preparation for college, this was suddenly jumped up to four pages minimum. I missed this memo, as I was absent the first day we did a practice essay. So, on our first test, I turned in a page and a half. I failed the essay, which I don’t mind — after all, I didn’t do as I was expected to.

But later, during a fire drill I might add, our history teacher fell into step alongside me. “I’m going to have to fail you on that essay. It was way too short.” The first thing that struck me was he didn’t seem to realize I had had no indication that I was meant to write about three times as much as I had. The second thing was that he “was going to have to fail me”, as if he really regretted it and he wished he could change it. The third thing was that he was saying this to me during a fire drill and with absolutely no context. I hadn’t even been in his class when the alarm rang. He just happened to be next to me in the hall.

This was when I realized that the IB was the beginning of the end for all original thought and intelligence in my generation.

In art class later that day, I complained about how blunt he had been, and how I didn’t appreciate the way he broke it to me. I knew I hadn’t done as I needed to, but I was a bit hurt and annoyed that the teacher had been so callous about it. My classmates suggested that I was just too lazy to do the work and that I should stop whining.

In English, we began the year studying the poet Pablo Neruda. Have you read this Not Always Learning story? That was me, and my English class, and my English teacher. I wrote her response down verbatim at the time because it was so unbelievable, in order to tell others about it later.

There was one good thing about the IB, and that was Theory of Knowledge. In Theory of Knowledge, you study knowledge itself, and philosophy, and the — well, the theory of knowledge. It was corrupted by some pretty stupid IB influences, like the ways of learning and the learner profiles, but for the most part it was an immensely enjoyable course. Unfortunately, you begin it in your second semester of junior year and finish it first semester of senior year. I quit the IB program after junior year, so I wasn’t able to continue.

The teachers didn’t care, and the students didn’t care. For all their talk of creativity and preparation for the future, we were never encouraged to think for ourselves. We were there to learn facts, spit them back out again, and forget them immediately, only to cram for the final exam the night before. I learned less in my junior year of high school than I did in the first day of preschool.

If only you could see my school’s IB Facebook group.

By the end of the year, all my classmates were constantly complaining about the injustice of the IB, and boy, was I feeling vindicated.

One of the things constantly repeated by our IB teachers was the idea of “academic rigor”. Part of the goal of the IB was, indeed, to subject us to the academic rigor that we would encounter in college and the plain rigor we’d encounter beyond schooling. The only teacher who seemed to agree that the way they overused and misused the term was — well, who else but the Theory of Knowledge teacher? In his class, we once discussed what they really meant, harking back to my own thoughts on “the real world”.

The IB did not feature academic rigor. The IB featured busywork.

The IB did not feature academic rigor. The IB featured constant regurgitation of facts.

The IB did not feature academic rigor. The IB featured mindless sheepdom.

Most of all, the IB did not prepare me for any world, real or imaginary, that featured any semblance of actual humanity or human development.

The IB is what made me decide that I don’t want to go to college, that I don’t want to spend several thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education I don’t need in order to get a job I don’t want. The IB is what made me decide that I would do everything I could to change public schooling for the better in order to get rid of things like this. Not to mention the fact that one of my teachers openly admitted how few colleges actually cared about students from the IB anyway, because they’re not aware of the “academic rigor” we go through. Not to mention that, back in middle school, one of my teachers explained to us that all the policies and curricula and plans and everything else that the IB puts on its students and teachers was the way he’d been taught to teach and had been teaching for seventeen years — but then someone put a name on it in order to make money. Come to think of it, those were both math teachers...

As much as I would like to, I cannot enumerate every sin committed upon me and my peers by my teachers and their superiors in my junior year of high school, or upon my peers in our senior year. I can only hope that what I’ve written here is enough to convince you, or give you at least the most basic idea, of the awful, awful, awful IB. Yes, I wrote three and a half pages of buildup just to talk about how bad it is. No, most of this doesn’t have anything to do with the IB.

No, I never acted on my feelings for “Anne”, or “Wendy”, or especially “Sam”. No, I never picked up a trumpet again. No, I never returned to tae-kwon-do (nor, apparently, did I explain why I left it). No, I don’t have any idea why I included those things here.