‘The problems of the second act’

September 4, 2017

In a very interesting little book by David Mamet called ‘3 Uses of the Knife: On the nature and purpose of drama’ there is a section called ‘The problems of the second act.’  I can’t reproduce the whole section here, but I’m going...

Summer Investigations(3) Works on the PLT: Cheese

August 23, 2017

For the last of these recommendations, a work composed in Dutch by a Flemish author, A.J de Ridder, writing under the pseudonym, Willem Elsschot.  To my knowledge, Cheese, has not appeared on any IB Language A: Literature syllabus, and I’d like to make the case...

And the results are in!

August 16, 2017

…Well, they were in a month ago. As teachers, more than anything we are most interested in the grade boundaries for each paper. For two years we were flying blind, trying to guide our students to passing, or in some instance, the elusive 7. And now that...

Integrating CAS and History

August 7, 2017

In IBDP there has been an emphasis in recent years in integrating the core (EE, TOK and CAS) with the course content in the different subjects. In history, it has been nearly effortless to integrate EE and TOK. The skills in the History IA layer nicely with the...

140 Characters in the IB Classroom

June 28, 2017

The word “Twitter” (as in a certain social media platform) has been turning up more and more in the news recently.  Twitter itself isn’t new (if you’re interested, you can read the history of Twitter in this post on lifewire), and it...

Summer Investigations (2) Works on the PLT: The Thief and the Dogs

June 26, 2017

As we try to balance shorter and longer works in our hopes that students will fully read and engage with the texts in the syllabus, I think we are all inclined to look for works that work;  for works that are reasonably riveting for all of our students and that expand...