From Middle School to IB: How are they different?

The IB can be a treacherous place for newcomers from middle school, but what exactly is different? Today, I'll be talking about some of the many ways in which studying in the IB is a bit different from middle school!

How different is the workload?

The general consensus on the IB workload is that it's barely tolerable and is super difficult to get through: as soon as you get home from studying at school, you study at home until you sleep and you have NO time for extracurriculars or socialisation. Well, I do have to admit that the longer you're in the IB, the more work you have.

My middle school experience:
While in middle school, I didn't get that much homework (at most maybe an hour per night worth of work if I really wanted to dedicate myself to getting perfect marks). During 7th grade, I had an incredibly average GPA of around 8.4 according to the Finnish grading system out of 10: not terrible, but definitely not even close to the best GPA in class. This required absolutely minimal effort on my part: studying for tests the night before and barely completing homework on time, if at all. In saying this, I have to mention the fact that I'd just moved to Finland and was experiencing a lot of changes, especially as a preteen. At the time, academics just weren't that important to me. To me, getting a good group of friends and feeling like I fit in was the main thing I focused on. Because of this, I ended up slacking off in a lot of my classes.

However, once I began to settle in I realised that my academics did end up mattering, especially in the case I wanted to go to an IB school. This was one of my only options as a high school for me at the time, since my Finnish language skills were really poor and I felt like a Finnish school would be a very alienating environment. So, I began to work.

This work is what I like to call a self-inflicted workload, where the work I ended up doing as homework extended past what needed to be completed for the next class, but actually meant that I would rewrite notes from the textbook and study for hours on end everyday. Eighth grade was especially full of this self-inflicted workload and it ended up actually benefiting me: not only did I learn which methods of studying suited me best, but my GPA jumped from an 8.4 to 9.75. Receiving my report card at the end of the year was an incredible feeling, because I finally felt like my work throughout the year paid off.

My experience in the IB:
I realised not long after entering IB1 that GPA was much less important than in middle school: you have to complete the work and that's basically it. In middle school, I remember trying to write the most detailed and thorough answers I could to any and all questions: I'd make sure I'd memorised the material by heart and if I didn't quite grasp a concept, I'd make a note of it and grill the teacher with questions the next lesson about it. While I learnt in the most thorough way possible during middle school by being so rigorous with my studying technique, I wouldn't say the same technique is really necessary once you enter the IB. This took me a long time to work out.

See, in Pre-IB, I continued using the same sort of methods to study, with pretty insane schedules to make sure I'd understood each nitty gritty aspect of the textbooks we had. But, after some time, I realised I simply didn't need to continue in the same way, and I'll tell you why.

Entering the IB school of your dreams can -for the classic nerd- feel a bit like your dreams have come true and you will finally belong with a bunch of like-minded, academically focused people. While this may still be the case, you've basically just earned yourself a spot in the Olympics. When I say that, I mean that the other people that are now around you have worked equally as hard to get to where you are and the workload this new school gives you will actually be the equivalent workload to what you've been committing your self-inflicted workload time to. Therefore, I say this with utmost sincerity: the amount of work your school gives you is the amount that you need to remember the information... you don't need to study extra for your homework! As long as you're covered in the topics and you have things completed on time, you won't need to do this extra work you were once well-acquainted with in middle school!

What do school hours look like in the IB?

My experience in middle school:
My experience of middle school was a little torn between what I did in Australia and what I did in Finland, but in both countries I experienced the same things: you basically always start at 08:00 or 09:00 and finish at 15:00 or 16:00, without fail. This means around 6 hours of studying next to nonstop. While for some this is a great time frame that allows you to get a lot done when you're outside of home, I felt that it was constricting to study for so many hours, especially when half the class time would be dedicated to the teachers trying to calm students down and make them focus. However, I'm a little bit biased: I tend to be very extroverted and sociable, and this "distracts others from being able to do their work" (according to many end-of-year reports I've received). While I don't doubt that that's the case, it bugs me a little that I was able to both complete the work I was given and have extra time to talk... doesn't that mean that I should be given more challenging work or more in-class flexibility (like focusing on individual projects)? In the end, I knew one thing for certain: middle school had way too much in-class time and had a rigid structure that I basically didn't like.

My experience in the IB:
One word pretty much sums it up for me: FLEXIBILITY! I understood what it meant to have some free classes here and there in middle school, but I usually had pretty straightforward days made up of around 6-7 hours of being at school. However, for me personally, the IB is a completely different story. Some days, I can have classes from 8:15 to 16:15 (that's a hefty 8 hours) and on other days I can have from 12:05 to 16:15 (a mere 4 hours!!). In saying this, my friends and I have come to realise that the IB is heavily reliant on flexibility of schedules and a large degree of independency on the part of the student when it comes to studying. In the Finnish curriculum, it's mandatory to fill up a certain amount of courses, and to do so you might have to take some extra cooking classes or language classes to fill up your schedule so you can graduate. This usually means less homework and assignments are given to the students because they have more hours in school.

In the case of the IB though, there are much more assignments and less in-class work. This actually has benefited me greatly, along with my friends, because it is something we were already acquainted to before we began in the IB... all the way in middle school where we took it upon ourselves to work harder to get higher grades than the rest of the class. The IB knows the nature of their students and takes advantage of it by giving you assignments for out-of-school time to work on. Therefore, they're relying on you to pick up the slack and really organise your time to accommodate the at-home workload.

Here's an example of the schedule for my second term: I barely have classes and
on most days I have skips to complete my homework during!

What do teachers expect from you in the IB?

My experience in middle school:
Teachers in my middle school were kind of controlling when it came to school work, and understandably so. They would make sure you'd turn in homework and attend classes and work hard during class because of the simple fact that middle school is a turning point for youths, and if they don't make sure their students are participating it could lead down a slippery slope to dropping out. To begin with, the teachers' way of making sure students did their work really kept me in-line and focused when I didn't feel I had much direction when studying. This progressed into me aiming to achieve more and impress them when they would ask "can you show me what you did for homework?" and, as you can probably deduce from my studying style, this led me to further push myself to achieve more and more.

In saying this, I have to admit that this can also make you feel like you're constantly being surveilled. If you're having a bad day (or week) or didn't sleep well and you just didn't have the energy to complete your homework, the teachers might not take it too lightly. If you're going through a rough patch that lasts a bit longer, you might even fall behind and be perceived by some teachers as lazy. This leads me into...

My experience in the IB
I've found that virtually all my teachers emphasize the fact that the amount of work you do and the time you put in is completely up to you. This means that if you fall behind, they might wish you a "good luck" at most and rely on the fact that you will take the workload into your stride. This actually makes me feel completely autonomous over what goes on with my work. For example, if I'm behind on math work due to some not school related issue, I will be left to catch up on my work and not have a teacher breathing down my neck about it. This has helped me immensely in feeling confident about my workload and how I should be balancing my time, rather than having a teacher set personal deadlines for me.

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