A Farewell to FIB

By: Chelsea Zhang

With the start of the new academic year, our school welcomes many new students. However, for students who join in Grade 10, their experience is unlike any other new students’. Returning Grade 10 students continue to take the IGCSE or their UWC courses. But since the IGCSE is spread out over two years, our school does not allow new G10 students to join halfway, instead creating a separate one-year course for newcomers: the FIB course. In this way, new Grade 10 students don’t join the majority of the grade, but are separated to form their own, self-contained community. This presents a problem – FIBs’ isolation from the rest of the student body.

To make matters worse, we take our classes with the same people every period, every day for a year. As a FIB student myself, I understand the frustration of my peers. I have heard many complaints from my classmates that they can’t even name half of the people in the other FIB class, much less the other students in G10 or our wider school community of 3,000 students. I have also heard of a white shirt who joined the school in G9 still not knowing the majority of her classmates when she started G11, which really puts into perspective the isolation of the 40 students or so joining yearly.

Though FIB students do get to know other students outside of class time, like in their respective mentor groups or through joining societies, the time they spend together is, in fact, very limited. Apart from the allocated 30 minutes in mentor group, our interactions are nothing more than the occasional wave hello to each other when crossing paths in the Tent Plaza or the 10-minute polite exchange while queueing for lunch.

This makes for poor preparation for the IB. Once the IB course starts, instead of having a total of 20 classmates, you add another 320. Starting the IB and having to get to know your 300 other classmates is an incredible amount of stress for 16-year-olds, so developing a tight-knit group of friends you know you can rely on a year prior definitely has its advantages.

Having said that, the FIB does have its own set of strengths. The course has its ways of helping new students to quickly find friends and establish stronger relationships with each other before being thrown into the stressful two-year course of IB. For example, the Tioman trip at the start of Term One allows new students to experience firsthand our school’s focus on outdoor education, as well as expose them to a set of challenges and activities that concentrate on team building and cooperation. During the one-week residential trip, students live, eat and work together to complete the day’s tasks. This allows us to get to know each other, as well as learn more about the values we hold as a school.

However, in the future, if the school decides to introduce other new courses, they should create more chances for the new students to get to know returning students. Personally, though making friends with the other FIBs was great as a new student, I do wish that I had had the chance to meet more of the other students in my cohort – a thought that I imagine to be very common among FIBs. Going into IB, other than feeling the pressure of picking the right courses, keeping up with the assignments and maintaining extracurriculars, being thrown into classes with people I have never met before makes up a large part of my stress. This is why making sure that all students know and are comfortable with each other before starting the IB is so important.

Now, this year happens to be the final year that the FIB course is being offered, so this piece also serves as a farewell to our beloved program. Next year, instead of the IGCSE, our school will be offering our own separate one-year courses for Grades 9 and 10, so that new students joining will be able to get to know more people in their grade and develop a wider range of connections with classmates. Though the FIB course has its drawbacks, we should definitely remember the good times that we’ve shared in the one-year FIB course, and treasure the friendships that we’ve built. But understanding where this change in curriculum is coming from is also important. Hopefully, our new students next year will be a little more pleased with the arrangement and will still be able to establish strong friendships with each other as well.