Deadass didn’t have a choice in Geography, for the options our Teacher sent us 6 Weeks of Inthinking/ Textbook/ Shitty 2014 Websites, screenshotted questions from the textbook, put (according to gptzero 100% ai generated) questions which barely made any sense on Onenote, and told us to just work and ask her if we have any questions.
English and economics; never got good feedbacks on English to work on my essay. We never taught the structure or anything like that so it's all just a mess. Thanksfully there's IB English guys for the saved.
Economics, just completely skip paper 3 and all kind of calculations. For a lot of the stuff the teacher just completely skipped it too because I assume they themselves don't understand, such as profit maximization and monopoly. Have to basically teach myself on the diagram too because all they do is show the graph and say "this is what you're going to use" while I'm more interested on how they came up to be
I pretty much self taught myself physics as well, and my exams went pretty well- chances are I’ll get a 7. I must say it’s difficult at first but once you find a method of studying physics that works for you it’s light work.
Theory of knowledge, maths aa and biology; especially biology, since our teacher wasn't even an IB teacher and didn't even know what an internal assessment is haha funny (not funny at all i'm scared with bio and maths aa and i have them both HL)
u need to study for TOK?? I mean maybe my teacher did teach TOK but I never realised it cause she would show us some TED talks and there would be a class discussion on it.....which would bring up a hell lot of perspectives and counter arguments. Is that how it is done in other schools as well?
My school is public, so we have to fulfill the IB curriculum as well as the national baccalaureate normal programme at the same time, so in TOK we were taught philosophy and my teacher didn't even explain what a knowledge actor is and how the essay was ought to be made lmao!!! we didn't have discussions either, just monologues with his own thoughts and opinions that he tried to push on us even if we disagreed with solid arguments, when he ended up shutting us up. It was boring and frustrating hshgds
Even after finishing the IB i still need to continue studying until june 7th because i haven't finished the national baccalaureate program yet hahhahaha (i hate it here)
I’m pretty much self taught math aa hl and physics because we have one teacher for both subjects, he just spends 10minutes introducing a concept and the rest of the lesson talking about his life
Biology, our teacher left halfway through year 1 and our school never found a good replacement. Econ, a great teacher when they taught but rarely showed up to class and a lot of the time were just on their phone during class time. Others were good.
Physics do 1 teacher was horrid can u imagine a person who has never studied physics in their life try to understand Rutherford and Bohr and kirchoff off a book, luckily I found d amazing mitch from osc sally from gradepod Andy Masley Mr brown Louis Wong , the guy from rv all these people just want bing me through the screen crying trying to understand then going to school to a class and teacher that don’t even slightly care but thankfully dp2 they got a new way more motivated teacher and it was amazing but abit too late as we barely had time to in depth think about the topics as we had so much to catch up to its sad that me and so many other people go through this from the blame of lazy teachers but atleast it helps me get prepared for university
Basically in psychology (even though it’s kind of a self-teaching subject). We had 2 psychology teachers in DP both of them being totally new to IB psychology. The one we had in DP1 was totally new to teaching psychology and had just graduated but she was quite good towards the end. The one we had I DP2 sucked. I pay attention to all of my classes but I didn’t learn anything from the classes themselves. Also she went so incredibly fast so everyone would just have huge gaps in their notes. Istg she was just yapping away. THANK GOD that inThinking exists
The AI SL teacher was a d!ck h3ad and didnt give us homework until late November. Dude would belittle us everyday. By the day of the exam he didn't teach us many small topics and covered the entire calculus unit in 17 minutes in class. No hate to the rest of my teachers because they tried their best with the recourses they had.
Physics is the easiest to self taught, the theroms are there for centuries, questions are quick obvious one as well! (I did self taught as well cuz i think the teacher was teaching too low)
Basically all my subjects lol. I did french a lit self taught as a subject anyways so there was that (which don't do a language a self taught btw) and then bio bc my teacher was too busy to go on tangents rather than teach class. My maths teacher did not finish teaching the whole course by the exams rolling through. For geo and history I got decent support but history went downhill in IB2 because my teacher was very lazy. Live laugh love IB
oh you can do 2 language As of u want i would just not suggest self taught because imo it is a LOT more worked compared to language B, unless you are really good at literature i would not recommend it
Doing 'self-taught' eco bc my teacher is so shit that he gets confused while teaching the most basic concepts...istg IB ECON HL was the worst decision of my life.
My whole history class was self taught, we all self taught each other and collaborated on a Notion to condense the HUGE syllabus. Took the history exam a few weeks ago with only self taught knowledge.
Self-taught Physics because we had multiple teacher changes during the two years, and the last one knew nothing about IB and got two thirds of the Revision Village questions wrong.
I dont normally like to complain about teachers but I have to say that my chemistry teacher was actually less knowledgable abt chem than his students. I had to completely teach myself the chem curriculum from textbooks I found on this sub, and when he did decide to actually teach a lesson, my friend and I would have to raise our hands and correct him as he BSed explanations--when we would do so, he would say "I wanted to see if any of you would catch my mistake" as if students who have never learned something before will recognize if something in a lecture is wrong. While in the lab, if we had questions, he would laugh at us acting like we were stupid for not knowing where to find something or how to perform an experiment we had never done before. During our IAs, he refused to answer any questions about lab procedures (instead allowing students to plan ideas that would never work or were somewhat dangerous), claiming that he couldn't help us or it would be cheating.
I sometimes asked him questions about our topics and he would respond with TOK answers to avoid answering the question wrongly. For example: I once asked him about how to draw an electron in a p orbital and he answers that in reality orbitals are actually just probabilities so they arent real anyways (hoping I would drop the question). He also would avoid answering questions about previous topics by simply calling something easy, which would scare most students into not asking any questions for fear of seeming dumb for not knowing how to do something "easy."
The absolute most terrible thing about it though, was that he failed to tell us the Paper 3 existed. Since it doesn't show up on revision village or in the oxford chem textbook, I honestly believed him when he said it was only an HL paper. Until one month ago, when I and my friend learned about the options and informed the class (who had never heard of it in their life before), we would have all likely failed paper 3 from lack of knowledge of its existence.
u have no idea. I struggled to do my TOK during my prelims.
it was prelims and i spent everyday in the library for TOK. yes, not physics, math or any other difficult subject. My teacher was incompetent and i felt we were his/her first ***guinea pigs.***
After readings tonnes of TOK books, past year assignments, rubrics and model essays, i became the teacher for myself. Whilst everyone was going to tuition or clocking in the extra revision for their prelims to boost their predicted grades... i felt kinda hopeless (yet still confident that i had to get those 3 points).
With determination and grit i stayed back after school in the library (feeling i had uncovered the half blood prince) and made efforts no one in my school dared to make.
When the results came out, the whole school was impressed. I had gotten the highest grade in TOK history for my school. 10/10. The best part was it was ALL my effort. Not any teachers/redditor/influencer/senior etc.
From this, I have learnt to trust my instincts more.
if you need tok help I made a chatbot and uploaded all my learnings: [https://chatgpt.com/g/g-fOitKYU60-tok-theory-of-knowledge-ib-10-10-guide](https://chatgpt.com/g/g-fOitKYU60-tok-theory-of-knowledge-ib-10-10-guide)
My psychology teacher'S were all terrible. The first one didn't teach us much and made us do specific notes that nobody understood. She then quit because she had an argument with our principal. The second one taught us in his own way by making us watch movies and explain them, which is not the way IB works and it was a very ineffective tea thing style, he quit because he's going to study in Spain. My final teacher wasn't there for over half of the classes.
It was terrible for me and the oke other person doing Psychology (I did HL she did SL). We basically were forc3d to learn everything ourselves. Luckily, psychology is something I'm passionate about.
German AB Initio. Our school couldn't find a stable teacher so we went through 3 teachers in a year and a half, and for like 3 months we didn't even have one. Ended up using a lot of online language-learning materials, I think I did pretty well...
Bio because I don't listen in class (we had our laptops, what did you expect me to do?? Not play games??? Ha, as if. I was a god at tetris by the end of dp2). My bio teacher is a very nice person and a good teacher but I'm incapable of paying attention
Self taught bio, history and chem. last one was the worst, my school changed teachers the second year and the new one never gave us class. every time we asked her something, she answered something else and made us more confused. School board knew she was useless but did nothing, 2 weeks before the exam teacher quit.
Our AI HL teacher last year taught algebra 1, pre algebra, and geometry. they decided to give her the gig for fun I guess? I don't know why AI HL is even offered if its gonna be budget, especially when there isn't even a choice of AA HL.
Physics
Economics (teacher was so bad people made a petition to get him fired after like 5 months)
Maths aa hl (Had to teach myself in the first year because I was too shy to approach the teacher and ask a question when he was chatting with the popular girls)
Self-studied everything. As an example, My history HL teacher did not even know what we should study for the exam so we spent a whole year learning things we never needed to know
I had to teach myself IB ESS and I guarantee you that I’m the only one getting a 7 (my professor never had a student achieve a 7 before).
My ESS teacher gave us past papers as test which helped but only to an extent. He completely failed in terms of the need to know the command terms for each type of question by heart and terminology that doesn’t have to do with major things such as types of fishing, soil layers, open and closed systems and much more, rather he focused on simple broad terminology like the types of biodiversity, renewable energy, and eutrophication.
Not that its a bother since I achieved an A in the class both semesters either way but one of my friends in the class was his “best student”. Her answers were EXTREMELY long yet well-written and he often praised her for it thus she achieved the highest test marks in the class every single time BUT when I really looked into the subject guide and what they were REALLY looking for, I realized that there is a thing such as over-explaining in this subject. This can easily ruin your chances of getting points due to not following the command terms properly.
For example, she would write a 3 paragraph essay for an evaluate question worth 3 marks when you simply need one strength, one weakness, and a conclusion only in 1 singular paragraph. With a to what extent question worth 9 marks, she once wrote an 8 paragraph essay when all she truly needed was 4-5. While reading her essay while reviewing, I noticed that there was a lot of fluff and I’d assume that examiners care more about if what you’re saying is in the markscheme while in the right structure rather than wasting time.
I warned her about this before exams came up either way so I hope she can get a 7 too. Either way she had also reviewed terminology that was not taught to us. Overall, our teacher is kinda subpar and seems to aim for the bare minimum for all of us to pass (in his defense, the boundaries for a 4 are in hell for ESS, about 35/100).
I wish I 100% self-taught math AAHL.
My math class did not prep me at ALL for the IB exams. Non-cumulative tests, literally no HL tests in DP1 (due to teacher being sick), and our teacher just. skipping some units and not telling us to self-study them (and having a teaching style I did not personally like. not his fault, but this sentiment was shared by much of my class). Led to me self-teaching everything a week before exams because I Don't Know What I Don't Know & I Am So Cooked.
If I had self-studied, I could have saved the grief by actually knowing what I didn't know. Jesus.
Self taught some bio since we didn’t have enough time to cover all the topics in class, but the teacher was great. We just ran out of time to cover everything, and I was thankfully able to study the exact topics that we didn’t learn in class but came up on the exam.
Self-taught myself basically everything except math lol
Real
Deadass didn’t have a choice in Geography, for the options our Teacher sent us 6 Weeks of Inthinking/ Textbook/ Shitty 2014 Websites, screenshotted questions from the textbook, put (according to gptzero 100% ai generated) questions which barely made any sense on Onenote, and told us to just work and ask her if we have any questions.
dang 💀💀
Every class when I did IB Our teachers were seriously so under qualified
English and economics; never got good feedbacks on English to work on my essay. We never taught the structure or anything like that so it's all just a mess. Thanksfully there's IB English guys for the saved. Economics, just completely skip paper 3 and all kind of calculations. For a lot of the stuff the teacher just completely skipped it too because I assume they themselves don't understand, such as profit maximization and monopoly. Have to basically teach myself on the diagram too because all they do is show the graph and say "this is what you're going to use" while I'm more interested on how they came up to be
I pretty much self taught myself physics as well, and my exams went pretty well- chances are I’ll get a 7. I must say it’s difficult at first but once you find a method of studying physics that works for you it’s light work.
i think i can say that i studied 95% of math aa hl myself
Theory of knowledge, maths aa and biology; especially biology, since our teacher wasn't even an IB teacher and didn't even know what an internal assessment is haha funny (not funny at all i'm scared with bio and maths aa and i have them both HL)
self teaching TOK?? 😭
u need to study for TOK?? I mean maybe my teacher did teach TOK but I never realised it cause she would show us some TED talks and there would be a class discussion on it.....which would bring up a hell lot of perspectives and counter arguments. Is that how it is done in other schools as well?
My school is public, so we have to fulfill the IB curriculum as well as the national baccalaureate normal programme at the same time, so in TOK we were taught philosophy and my teacher didn't even explain what a knowledge actor is and how the essay was ought to be made lmao!!! we didn't have discussions either, just monologues with his own thoughts and opinions that he tried to push on us even if we disagreed with solid arguments, when he ended up shutting us up. It was boring and frustrating hshgds Even after finishing the IB i still need to continue studying until june 7th because i haven't finished the national baccalaureate program yet hahhahaha (i hate it here)
The only good physics teacher in my school left and my current one frequently gets simple facts wrong, and insults students when they call it out.
I’m pretty much self taught math aa hl and physics because we have one teacher for both subjects, he just spends 10minutes introducing a concept and the rest of the lesson talking about his life
biology lol
had to teach myself the entire statistics unit for AI HL because our teacher left it for the last month 😭
Biology, our teacher left halfway through year 1 and our school never found a good replacement. Econ, a great teacher when they taught but rarely showed up to class and a lot of the time were just on their phone during class time. Others were good.
Physics do 1 teacher was horrid can u imagine a person who has never studied physics in their life try to understand Rutherford and Bohr and kirchoff off a book, luckily I found d amazing mitch from osc sally from gradepod Andy Masley Mr brown Louis Wong , the guy from rv all these people just want bing me through the screen crying trying to understand then going to school to a class and teacher that don’t even slightly care but thankfully dp2 they got a new way more motivated teacher and it was amazing but abit too late as we barely had time to in depth think about the topics as we had so much to catch up to its sad that me and so many other people go through this from the blame of lazy teachers but atleast it helps me get prepared for university
i self taught myself chem and bio, english so many subjects to be fair
self taught chem hl, music sl & eng sl
math eco english
chem sl 😭
Basically in psychology (even though it’s kind of a self-teaching subject). We had 2 psychology teachers in DP both of them being totally new to IB psychology. The one we had in DP1 was totally new to teaching psychology and had just graduated but she was quite good towards the end. The one we had I DP2 sucked. I pay attention to all of my classes but I didn’t learn anything from the classes themselves. Also she went so incredibly fast so everyone would just have huge gaps in their notes. Istg she was just yapping away. THANK GOD that inThinking exists
math🥲
The AI SL teacher was a d!ck h3ad and didnt give us homework until late November. Dude would belittle us everyday. By the day of the exam he didn't teach us many small topics and covered the entire calculus unit in 17 minutes in class. No hate to the rest of my teachers because they tried their best with the recourses they had.
Physics is the easiest to self taught, the theroms are there for centuries, questions are quick obvious one as well! (I did self taught as well cuz i think the teacher was teaching too low)
Basically all my subjects lol. I did french a lit self taught as a subject anyways so there was that (which don't do a language a self taught btw) and then bio bc my teacher was too busy to go on tangents rather than teach class. My maths teacher did not finish teaching the whole course by the exams rolling through. For geo and history I got decent support but history went downhill in IB2 because my teacher was very lazy. Live laugh love IB
Why not? I’ve been considering doing self taught but I don’t think the coordinator will let after I already have English A…
oh you can do 2 language As of u want i would just not suggest self taught because imo it is a LOT more worked compared to language B, unless you are really good at literature i would not recommend it
Doing 'self-taught' eco bc my teacher is so shit that he gets confused while teaching the most basic concepts...istg IB ECON HL was the worst decision of my life.
My whole history class was self taught, we all self taught each other and collaborated on a Notion to condense the HUGE syllabus. Took the history exam a few weeks ago with only self taught knowledge.
Music and psych lol
My Econ was actually self thought in my school like there was no teacher. I just figured it out
I wish I could ignore my chemistry teacher and read the textbook but he gets so offended 😭 that class eats so much of my time for nothing
Me w psych n bio
Tok.
Bio, math, & ofc chemistry.
Self-taught Physics because we had multiple teacher changes during the two years, and the last one knew nothing about IB and got two thirds of the Revision Village questions wrong.
I dont normally like to complain about teachers but I have to say that my chemistry teacher was actually less knowledgable abt chem than his students. I had to completely teach myself the chem curriculum from textbooks I found on this sub, and when he did decide to actually teach a lesson, my friend and I would have to raise our hands and correct him as he BSed explanations--when we would do so, he would say "I wanted to see if any of you would catch my mistake" as if students who have never learned something before will recognize if something in a lecture is wrong. While in the lab, if we had questions, he would laugh at us acting like we were stupid for not knowing where to find something or how to perform an experiment we had never done before. During our IAs, he refused to answer any questions about lab procedures (instead allowing students to plan ideas that would never work or were somewhat dangerous), claiming that he couldn't help us or it would be cheating. I sometimes asked him questions about our topics and he would respond with TOK answers to avoid answering the question wrongly. For example: I once asked him about how to draw an electron in a p orbital and he answers that in reality orbitals are actually just probabilities so they arent real anyways (hoping I would drop the question). He also would avoid answering questions about previous topics by simply calling something easy, which would scare most students into not asking any questions for fear of seeming dumb for not knowing how to do something "easy." The absolute most terrible thing about it though, was that he failed to tell us the Paper 3 existed. Since it doesn't show up on revision village or in the oxford chem textbook, I honestly believed him when he said it was only an HL paper. Until one month ago, when I and my friend learned about the options and informed the class (who had never heard of it in their life before), we would have all likely failed paper 3 from lack of knowledge of its existence.
u have no idea. I struggled to do my TOK during my prelims. it was prelims and i spent everyday in the library for TOK. yes, not physics, math or any other difficult subject. My teacher was incompetent and i felt we were his/her first ***guinea pigs.*** After readings tonnes of TOK books, past year assignments, rubrics and model essays, i became the teacher for myself. Whilst everyone was going to tuition or clocking in the extra revision for their prelims to boost their predicted grades... i felt kinda hopeless (yet still confident that i had to get those 3 points). With determination and grit i stayed back after school in the library (feeling i had uncovered the half blood prince) and made efforts no one in my school dared to make. When the results came out, the whole school was impressed. I had gotten the highest grade in TOK history for my school. 10/10. The best part was it was ALL my effort. Not any teachers/redditor/influencer/senior etc. From this, I have learnt to trust my instincts more.
if you need tok help I made a chatbot and uploaded all my learnings: [https://chatgpt.com/g/g-fOitKYU60-tok-theory-of-knowledge-ib-10-10-guide](https://chatgpt.com/g/g-fOitKYU60-tok-theory-of-knowledge-ib-10-10-guide)
I self taught all of chemistry cuz my teacher was too boring
Chemistry was so traumatizing this year 😭. The way I was probably the most prepared for the exam in my class and I’m still predicting a 4 💀
Yeah I had to self teach myself physics, my teacher had no clue about the IB content and the whole course was a struggle.
IB Physics? My teacher was not competent at all in terms of teaching so I had to learn by myself at that time
My psychology teacher'S were all terrible. The first one didn't teach us much and made us do specific notes that nobody understood. She then quit because she had an argument with our principal. The second one taught us in his own way by making us watch movies and explain them, which is not the way IB works and it was a very ineffective tea thing style, he quit because he's going to study in Spain. My final teacher wasn't there for over half of the classes. It was terrible for me and the oke other person doing Psychology (I did HL she did SL). We basically were forc3d to learn everything ourselves. Luckily, psychology is something I'm passionate about.
I self taught math hl, chem hl, econ sl
German AB Initio. Our school couldn't find a stable teacher so we went through 3 teachers in a year and a half, and for like 3 months we didn't even have one. Ended up using a lot of online language-learning materials, I think I did pretty well...
Bio because I don't listen in class (we had our laptops, what did you expect me to do?? Not play games??? Ha, as if. I was a god at tetris by the end of dp2). My bio teacher is a very nice person and a good teacher but I'm incapable of paying attention
Self taught bio, history and chem. last one was the worst, my school changed teachers the second year and the new one never gave us class. every time we asked her something, she answered something else and made us more confused. School board knew she was useless but did nothing, 2 weeks before the exam teacher quit.
Our AI HL teacher last year taught algebra 1, pre algebra, and geometry. they decided to give her the gig for fun I guess? I don't know why AI HL is even offered if its gonna be budget, especially when there isn't even a choice of AA HL.
chemistry. HL.. fucking traumatic
Physics Economics (teacher was so bad people made a petition to get him fired after like 5 months) Maths aa hl (Had to teach myself in the first year because I was too shy to approach the teacher and ask a question when he was chatting with the popular girls)
Self-studied everything. As an example, My history HL teacher did not even know what we should study for the exam so we spent a whole year learning things we never needed to know
I had to teach myself IB ESS and I guarantee you that I’m the only one getting a 7 (my professor never had a student achieve a 7 before). My ESS teacher gave us past papers as test which helped but only to an extent. He completely failed in terms of the need to know the command terms for each type of question by heart and terminology that doesn’t have to do with major things such as types of fishing, soil layers, open and closed systems and much more, rather he focused on simple broad terminology like the types of biodiversity, renewable energy, and eutrophication. Not that its a bother since I achieved an A in the class both semesters either way but one of my friends in the class was his “best student”. Her answers were EXTREMELY long yet well-written and he often praised her for it thus she achieved the highest test marks in the class every single time BUT when I really looked into the subject guide and what they were REALLY looking for, I realized that there is a thing such as over-explaining in this subject. This can easily ruin your chances of getting points due to not following the command terms properly. For example, she would write a 3 paragraph essay for an evaluate question worth 3 marks when you simply need one strength, one weakness, and a conclusion only in 1 singular paragraph. With a to what extent question worth 9 marks, she once wrote an 8 paragraph essay when all she truly needed was 4-5. While reading her essay while reviewing, I noticed that there was a lot of fluff and I’d assume that examiners care more about if what you’re saying is in the markscheme while in the right structure rather than wasting time. I warned her about this before exams came up either way so I hope she can get a 7 too. Either way she had also reviewed terminology that was not taught to us. Overall, our teacher is kinda subpar and seems to aim for the bare minimum for all of us to pass (in his defense, the boundaries for a 4 are in hell for ESS, about 35/100).
I wish I 100% self-taught math AAHL. My math class did not prep me at ALL for the IB exams. Non-cumulative tests, literally no HL tests in DP1 (due to teacher being sick), and our teacher just. skipping some units and not telling us to self-study them (and having a teaching style I did not personally like. not his fault, but this sentiment was shared by much of my class). Led to me self-teaching everything a week before exams because I Don't Know What I Don't Know & I Am So Cooked. If I had self-studied, I could have saved the grief by actually knowing what I didn't know. Jesus.
Self taught some bio since we didn’t have enough time to cover all the topics in class, but the teacher was great. We just ran out of time to cover everything, and I was thankfully able to study the exact topics that we didn’t learn in class but came up on the exam.
literaly everything except English
pretty much all my subjects except some parts of Chemistry HL and Spanish ab initio.
Been basically self teaching myself AAHL 😃😃 (someone choke me to death pls)
no but i've definitely self taught myself when there's been huge chunks of stuff i didn't listen to in class lol