Image Ingrid Schmoutziguer, 2025, generated with Gemini
Ladies, gentlemen and fellow sleep-deprived students,
Today, sat here at the ripe time of 8:30 am, we will celebrate the IB. IB is a program so rigorous, enriching and life-consuming that it’s an experience no one can forget, or recover from.
Firstly, let’s admire IB’s philosophy. It is not just an education, it is a lifestyle, a cult, and a pain in the butt. It shapes us into balanced, principled, reflective, knowledgeable, and open-minded thinkers, inquirers, communicators, and risk-takers. Why would you want to, you know, sleep or socialize when you could be writing your TOK essay? Who needs fun when you can have 4000-word essays, CAS and 6 subjects? IB doesn’t believe in free time. It believes in character building.
Caffeine and existential crises
And what a character it builds! IB students can write an analytical essay, solve a differential equation and question the nature of knowledge, all in 3 hours, while surviving on caffeine and existential crises. Success isn’t measured in happiness or sanity, but in word counts and grade boundaries.
Let us acknowledge CAS: the holy trinity. Why would you be doing literally anything else when you can write about how morning jobs are journeys to self-discovery? How could we forget the EE? Thanks to this, every 17-year-old can experience sleepless nights, self-distraught and mental breakdowns. Sure, it takes Harvard students years of research, but all I need is no food, 17 cups of coffee, 2 sleepless nights and teachers who are on my butt, even though they won’t read it till next month. (No pointing fingers!)
30% yapping
Of course, 4-hour HL lessons and 21 hours of homework per week isn’t enough to fully expand your knowledge or torture you. They thought it would be wise to add an IA (internal assessment). This way you can develop your multi-tasking skills and learn to balance writing a report worth 30%, yapping about non-literary texts and faking data. Personally, this isn’t enough to fully satisfy their curiosity and academic needs.
8 years late
Now, let’s dive deeper in ISU in specific. One of the most technological advanced schools, with fully functioning heaters, openable windows, and great smelling rooms. The IB teaches to never procrastinate and manage our time well. However, we learnt from the best. Our leadership team. We were promised a new building in grade 5, before secondary…we graduate next month. They say never miss a deadline, but we’ve personally never been 8 years late.
If we continue this speech, they will withhold our diplomas. We’re going to sit back now and let you enjoy the rest of English class with speeches with such invaluable information to which we will pay our utmost attention.
Yoshita Jain and Giovanni Mancini, students DP2
The Art of 6-Hour Bathroom Breaks (without getting caught)
In every grade in every school, you are sure to find a handful of students who are experts in the field of not studying. These students resort to more risk-taking, fun and active missions like skipping class by walking ten 400m laps around the school. While scientists struggle to explain black holes and time travel, these students have already mastered disappearing into the void, one bathroom break at a time.
Breath of fresh air
Now let’s understand the simple physics behind this anomaly. If a student walks at a speed of 32 km/hr and a distance of 10 meters at max, why does it take 45 minutes to go to the bathroom? The answer is pure distraction. Walking past the vending machine means stopping to buy a snack, popping in to say hi to their favorite teachers while they’re teaching, or even because they go outside for a nice breath of fresh air. It is truly an art.
Bladder control
But do you know who truly suffers in this process? It’s not the teachers, not the students who are not in class, but it is the students who ACTUALLY NEED to go to the bathroom. Poor students. These students have also probably learnt more about how to control their bladder than the actual curriculum itself.
So, next time you are trapped in your next unbearable class, just remember that you can always take a small bathroom break to ease off.
T.P., student DP2