What are the curriculum requirements for Mandarin B SL? I think my school is making our lessons much harder than the required curriculum?!

[poisonivious]

Hi IBSurvival-ers,

I wanted to ask about what is required as part of the mandarin B SL curriculum. For some reason, we're learning things like 古文 and interpreting things quoted by 孔子 we've read 5 pretty difficult works within half a year, such as 《边城》，《雷雨》and 《月牙儿》. This seems ridiculously hard, and I'm starting to wonder if our class had somehow been automatically made harder despite it being a Mandarin B, SL class, which should be easy. I'm currently studying in China, and I've learnt chinese in china for almost 6 years, and can speak and write well enough to cope within a Chinese enviroment, and I'm having major difficulties with keeping up as I can hardly scrape a C- in the class, which mainly consists of kids who have lived in China their whole lives and learnt Chinese as a first language. Can someone tell me whether or not this is normal? I'm freaking out because this has impacted my GPA in such a negative way, and I'm extremely concerned.

And in the case that my school is making these classes harder, is there anything I can do about it?

Thanks!

Edited March 4, 2012 by poisonivious

[Andyboi]

I'm sorry to hear that your gpa is being affected negatively by this class. That is strange for a B SL language class to be reading books, especially 5 of them! I'm in Spanish B HL and in the syllabus it says that HL must read at least 2 works of literature, which we have already done. Is there any way you can drop to Ab initio maybe? You might as well switch up to HL if you're going to be working you butt off . I wish I could recommend more but it's up to your school and your teacher to come up with the curriculum, especially for language classes.

[Katerine]

I think this sounds like to much, but on the birght side, if you do a lot of difficult work in class, the exams will be easy.

If you want to know exactely what is expected of you for the exams, you can find the laguage B syllabus by searching for it on google.

[twilight]

Your teacher is indeed teaching more advanced stuff. There's no 古文 involved in it, at least not for the old syllabus. They'll be changing syllabus next year, so I'm not sure if 古文 is included in the new syllabus. But honestly, 古文 is super difficult. It took me 2 full years to be able to comprehend it without any help. I don't think there's anything you can do if the teacher is teaching more advanced stuff. My teacher did say if we want to learn more, she'll teach beyond the syllabus and what is required. So I don't think there's a rule that says teachers cannot teach beyond the syllabus.

[ppincus]

Just wondering, what session are your exams? Because the syllabus for Group 2 is changing.

[poisonivious]

Our school doesn't offer Ab Initio so that's not an option.

I -think- I'm in the 2013 session, though I haven't quite figured out the whole IB thing yet.

I suppose it's comfoting to know that the test will probably be easier.

[Katerine]

If you are in the 2013 session it means you started the DP this school year and will have your exams in 2013.

Here is a link to the syllabus outline for language B, so you can have a look at it:

http://www.ibo.org/diploma/assessment/subjectoutlines/documents/d_2_ablan_gui-out_1102_1_e.pdf