Jump to content

I hate TOK, please, tell me I'm not the only one


Flow4421

Recommended Posts

Don't worry, you're definately not the only one. Although I quite liked TOK (some aspects of it and defs not the writing essays part), it is easy to see why it may seem unnecessary.

 

However, no matter what subject you do, you're bound to think the same at some point (eg - what do we have to learn calculus? do we have to study shakespeare? am I ever going to use these diagrams in real life?! etc etc) Yet we still study those right? So think of TOK as the same. 

 

I guess only a minority of us liked TOK at school and we were the ones always arguing with the teacher about what something meant etc. To be honest, sometimes its just fun arguing and u can do a lot of that in TOK. Try making it as fun as you can, either by challenging the teacher or challenging ur subject teacher about stuff relating to TOK (eg ask maths teacher if pi is really a number or concept or what? or ask your science teacher to explain why ur learning stuff that isn't necessarily 'true' for all cases and stuff like that. 

 

Otherwise, treat it as a bludge lesson but learn the basics and trust me, I worked on ALL assignments SUPER late but still managed an A... u just gotta know the jargon and methadology used in TOK. Don't question it, just do it because you have to...kinda like swallowing medicine. 

Link to post
Share on other sites

I like the the subject, so probably on the other side of TOK. Cause it enables us to challenge the worlds conventions and to think independently and differently. There is no right or wrong answer and this is the merit and a demerit of the subject. But in the end its your attitude towards the subject that decides your liking.

  • Like 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

Also, I think that the quality of TOK lessons depends almost entirely on teacher. It can be either enlighting or boring/confusing. Personally I'm not the biggest fan of TOK because I sometimes suspect that our TOK teacher does not really "get" TOK (though I may be a bit arrogant thinking that, I admit :P ). We spend more time discussing contemporary issues than actually learning epistemology which may be interesting for some people in my class but (having read the subject description) I dare think it is not what TOK should be all about. Do you also mostly discuss contemporary issues during your TOK classes? Is it normal?

Edited by Sceptyczka
Link to post
Share on other sites

If it makes you feel any better, my cynical explanation of why we have to take TOK in the IB is because it allows the IB a USP when trying to persuade schools to part with loads of £££ to offer the programme. If the IB didn't have TOK, it would lose a lot of its propaganda points! Everything besides TOK can be achieved in most other educational systems. TOK is also used by the IBO to prop up some of the mysterious "IB learner profile" points that they occasionally like to set to music and stick on Youtube to persuade parents to stick their offspring in the programme. Global reflective brave principled balanced inquiring thinkers with an international mind is hard to sell when we just study the same stuff as everybody else. Why else would my chemistry lesson make me a better person than somebody else's chemistry lesson?? Throw in the wild card of 'TOK' and it's like that scene out of Toy Story where the aliens go "OooOOOooooOOO", people lap up that stuff.

 

As I said, cynical! But not without some truth, I think.

  • Like 6
Link to post
Share on other sites

I hate TOK and in our school there is only 1 TOK lesson per week. It is not enough !!!!! How many tok lessons do u have in your school?

 

I have 5 periods of TOK class, each class is 45 minutes long. Imagine that. IMAGINE THAT. I love it though, because it makes me think. I think I am a stoic person, but I don't know. I am not so sure. When I'm stuck writing the essay, I got depressed and stressed easily, and I suddenly hate TOK to it's very core. (and now I need to stop procrastinating). 

  • Like 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...
  • 1 year later...
  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

I hate TOK because the epistemology is explained in an incredibly simplistic way.  Our teachers opened the class by asking "Is it really a chair? How do you know it's a chair?" A friend of mine responded "I hate TOK because it challenges societal definitions!" TOK is the exact sort of class that should have equiped him with the thoughts of people like Wittgenstein, and he might've realized that yes, we have constructed the object in front of us to be a chair, but if we then ask "is it a chair," that is equally valid-- the meaning of words is dependant on how they are used.  Instead, students just sat through the lecture and began to think that all questions about how we know what we know are equally pointless.  Following this, we had to rank the ways of knowing based on what we trusted most.  The class is constructed in such a way that there's a reason/emotion dichotomy, and everyone answers reason.  However, we're never introduced to the limitations of reason, or confronted with the ways in which we're actually thinking irrationally.  We're never introduced to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or the works of David Hume or Karl Popper.  A student brought a recent article entitled "Does Language Change the Way We Think?" to class, and it likely seemed like a groundbreaking  knowledge question to them, only because they had never been introduced to the Safir-Whorf hypothesis.  I admire what TOK tries to do in encouraging students to question their beliefs and how they came by them, but it actually ends up being incredibly innefective and making a mockery of epistemic skepticism.  

Link to post
Share on other sites

  • 3 months later...

My school had TOK every second day starting at 7AM for both years of IB. Keep in mind the prescribed teaching time for TOK is something like 50 hours. 

And yes, attendance is mandatory, you can't sleep in class, you get docked marks for being late. Fond memories :)

Link to post
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...