By Pak Andy

My daughter recently moved to Los Angeles after signing a recording contract with 88Rising, the recording label of her dreams. The song she wrote, recorded, produced and for which she and her sister made the video using her iPhone has now accumulated over 100 million views and shares online. It went to number 1 or top 10 in many countries and the current remix, a duet with Jackson Wang, is still number 1 in China. Her Instagram account now boasts over a million followers, including K-Pop stars like Baekhyun, and Lexi Rabe, the 7-year-old actress who told Tony Stark (Ironman) “I love you 3000” in Avengers: Endgame.

Am I proud? You better believe it!

But, I’m not just proud of her. I am proud of the school she attended from Kindy through Year 12. She is an IB DP graduate from GJS and she will tell you herself that some of the things that contributed to her success were things she learned at school. Don’t ever dismiss the Learner Profile Attributes as an educational fad or just a trend. They are the skills that we need – actually the skills we have always needed – to succeed and to help make the world a better place for everyone.

Stephanie’s first song, Appreciate, followed the prescribed process from start to finish, including hiring a well-known group to produce it and paying a company to handle the release. It is a good song, but before people started Googling her because of I Love You 3000, Appreciate had racked up just 47,000 views. Stephanie didn’t give up. Instead, she reflected on the experience. She was open minded when her brother explained how she could do all of work herself and didn’t need to hire anyone else to do it for her. She decided to be a risk taker and give it a try despite never having done some of the things that were required. She began to inquire and took a course on music production and then, as a thinker, she exercised her newfound skills to approach the complex challenge of writing, arranging, producing the music and the video, and uploading the song to multiple online platforms.

I was with Stephanie in Singapore when she was contacted by 16 different record labels in America and Asia asking if she would like to talk with them about signing a recording deal. She didn’t need Dad to handle things for her. She had learned to be an excellent and honest communicator and all I could do was sit back in awe of what my baby girl had become.

By Pak Steve

The end of the first semester is near, which means semester exams are upon us. Year 11 exams are taking place from 2-10 December, with Years 8-10 exams taking place on 5 & 6 December. These exams serve many purposes, as both formative (to influence and improve teaching and learning) and summative (to measure student understanding) assessments. Exams also give us the opportunity to prepare students for the conditions under which they will take major exams in the future (UN, SAT, DP Exams, etc.), and to develop the skills necessary for success on those exams. It is with that in mind that I would like to write briefly about what it means to be a principled exam taker.

The IB Learner Profile describes being principled, in part, as, “We take responsibility for our actions and their consequences.” Often, when it comes to exams, we look at being principled as a commitment to academic honesty, i.e., an agreement to not cheat. By this view, a principled learner is one who accepts what they know and do not know and agrees to follow exam protocol, usually out of fear of the consequences if they are caught violating that protocol. Being principled, however, does not begin when we enter the exam room, it begins when we commit to a life of learning. Principled learners take control of their learning and commit themselves to developing the knowledge, skills, and understanding necessary to grow, not only as students, but as members of a global society. In the context of exams, this means eliminating the desire to cheat long before setting foot in the exam hall by submitting assignments on time, participating in class discussion, regularly attending lessons, and questioning that which they do not understand (or, even better, questioning that which they do understand in order to understand it better, or from a different perspective).

Exams can be a stressful time for students, but they do not have to be. By committing themselves to being principled learners, students can enter exams with confidence and the knowledge that they have already prepared themselves for success.