Students participating in the first year of the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at South Iredell High School say they are exploring things they never knew existed before.
“Traditional schools were boring,” Junior IB student Colt Bradley said. “We weren’t really being challenged. They were getting students to a certain level, but not beyond.”
Bradley, like all students in the South IB program, chose to forego a traditional high school academic experience. In ninth grade, he enrolled at Mount Mourne, which, along with Northview, had students in the ninth and tenth grades before South took over the high school IB program this year.
Bradley said that decision was extremely important to his educational development. He said he became interested in things he’d never thought about, like the Arabic language.
After back-to-back semesters his ninth grade year of Arabic, which is only available at the district’s IB schools, Bradley applied for and was accepted into a six-week summer program in Morocco, six weeks that Bradley said changed his life.“I learned a lot, but it didn’t really feel like school because we had so much fun with it,” Bradley said.He bartered in Arabic at marketplaces, called Souks in Morocco, and discussed politics and Islam with taxi drivers along with taking classes five hours a day Monday to Saturday. Bradley said his time in the IB program taught him how to talk and relate to anyone, yet still retain an individual attitude and perspective.
Others from the IB program are trying to follow in Bradley’s footsteps this year. Five students were told last week they were semifinalists for the same program Bradley took part in, which places students in Morocco, Jordan or Egypt. Six more are semifinalists for a six-week summer ecology and cultural study in Japan. Interviews for the students are in January and they will find out sometime in the spring whether they are chosen.
Sophomore IB student Jordan Daspit is one of the semifinalists wishing to go to Morocco or Jordan this summer. She signed up for IB at Mount Mourne her eighth grade year because she wanted to do something different, and because she was tired of the dress codes at Brawley Middle.
Daspit said she had little direction as far as what she wanted to do with her life before enrolling at Mount Mourne, but two years later her goals are more or less in place.
“I never watched the news,” Daspit said about before being in the IB program. “I wasn’t taking languages. I had no idea what I wanted to do.”
Now, Daspit is in the process of learning the six languages of the United Nations, which, besides English, are Arabic, Russian, Mandarin, French and Spanish. She wants to work in foreign diplomacy. Daspit said none of what she’s doing now would be possible without IB and the way the classes always push you to do more.
“If you get it and you need to go ahead, you don’t have to wait,” Daspit said.
The IB program at South has 225 students in its first year at the school; roughly 35 juniors, 90 sophomores and 100 freshman.
Michael Thier, South’s IB coordinator, said the program was invaluable for the students’ futures, both in the short-term as far as what college they are accepted into and in the long-term concerning how they interact with others and solve problems. IB focuses greatly on teaching students 21st century skills, things such as collaboration, information literacy and the ability to read, write and think critically along with being able to interpret primary source documents.
“It’s not the product,” Thier said. “It’s the process. It’s less what you learn. It’s how you learn it. You’re not teaching content for the sake of teaching content.”
All IB students also must work on a series of service projects throughout their junior and senior years. The program is called CAS and the students’ projects must fulfill the three things the acronym stands for: creativity, action and service. “The point is to challenge them and stretch them,” CAS coordinator Sarah Hawkins said. “Our goal is to make them well-rounded and give them experiences beyond themselves.”
A couple students in the program are going to be attempting Olympic ironman triathlons in the fall. Another thing Thier pointed to as a strength of the IB program is its diversity. He motioned towards a group of four IB students studying together; a Catholic, a Methodist and two Muslims.
“It’s not something you normally see in a typical American high school setting,” Thier said.
