Last Day of Classes for Grade 12s
Today our Grade 12s have their last timetabled class at ISA. Then the exams.
For students, exams are the last school event before they graduate. For many, they can feel like they are the most important one as well, determining where they go for the next stage of their education. It is quite natural to see them as the culmination of school: what everything that went before leads to.
There is some sense in that. When we review our curriculums from kindergarten upwards, we start at Grade 12 requirements and work backwards. In mathematics, for example, there is an academic journey that begins with learning to count and ends with differential and integral calculus over a decade later, each step between the two carefully plotted.
And there is a neatness to the consequence of exams, especially the IB: they are summed up by a single number, that so easily can become a comment (or a judgement) on the time spent in school. Schools themselves can use their students’ results in the same way.
Students are quite understandably anxious about what they are facing next month. However, although it may well be pretty much the last thing they do at ISA, it isn’t the culmination - the event that makes sense of everything that preceded it. School is about far more than final exams. It is about relationships made and developed, the courage to risk new things, the curiosity to explore; about trying, failing and trying again. Discovering who you are and realising what you are becoming.
IB students graduate with all kinds of aptitudes that are not part of any formal assessment - like the ability to self-manage and to take the initiative - that will mark them out at university, whatever their grades.
I would like to end by wishing the Grade 12s the best of luck in their IB exams over the next month and a half. They are important, but perhaps, when they look back, they will see them as one more important experience among others - not the be all and end all.
Comments
Post a Comment