IB English
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Language & literature Assessments in IB: Naming the device is not analysis
“The author uses a metaphor here.” Full stop. Student looks up, satisfied, as if the sentence has done its job. It hasn’t. It’s named a tool. It hasn’t said what the tool does. As lang and lit teachers, we see this phenomenon constantly, and the scale at which this persists, we can agree the student… Continue reading
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The IB feeling: Why You Don’t Remember the Books You “Studied” (And What To Do About It)
Dear IB kid, Here’s a quick test for you: name a book you studied in Lang Lit two years ago. Now name a book you just read — for fun, on your own, nobody assigning you paragraphs to annotate. Which one can you actually talk about? Which one do you remember how it made you… Continue reading
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Why the Best AI Prompters Are Often English Majors, Not Coders
Here’s a fact that surprises most people: several of the people who built Anthropic — the company behind the AI you might be using right now — studied literature, not computer science. Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s president and co-founder, has a degree in English Literature. So does Jack Clark, another co-founder, who worked as a journalist… Continue reading
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From Texts to Essays: How to Sound Formal When It Actually Matters
Here’s a quick guide to code-switching You already know how to switch your voice. You don’t text your best friend the way you’d email your principal — you just do it automatically. That skill has a name: code-switching, and it’s exactly what you need for academic writing. The good news? You don’t need a whole… Continue reading
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Compare and Contrast: Why do we even have to learn this!?
I was watching an interview with Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, when interviewer Wilfred Frost asked him a question that every MYP English student would immediately recognise. “Compare and contrast…” Continue reading
