Anyone has experience in getting your shcool to start teaching a new subject/class or knows how to get it to do so?

[random_savage 2]

Hello fellow IBers.

I have the following problem.

My school only offers two language B classes- German B and Spanish B. I already know Polish but since my school is in Poland already runs it as A lang and I had reached the conclusion that without a comprehensive background with Polish schooling doing the school course is nearly impossible.

Now I started doing German B, however the problem I have is that it seems to be a waste of time. I want to work for a certain agency in the US government (and the government in general if I fail to get in) and have been told by pretty high ranking people and read in official documents that German and Spanish are languages which no one needs at all since they already got tons of people who know them.

I've narrowed the list of languages down to two- Russian and Japanese (at the ab inito level).

The first should be relatively easy to learn as I know Polish already.

Japanese on the other hand is much harder, but since there is a phonetic writing system in place (Kana) you aren't required to learn too many of the Kanji symbols and there's more high quality materials and entertainment to use as a base for studying it at home.

NOW HERE THE QUESTION ACTUALLY STARTS

So due to all I've written about above, I want to get my school to start up a new class. As far as I am concerned the only requirements are #1- 3 people willing to take part in it and #2 a teacher qualified to lead it. My school has no teachers qualified for any B languages outside Spanish and German.

Assuming condition #1 is met:

Since we are still in "pre-IB" would it be possible for the school to hire a teacher who would become an IB qualified educator by next year and have him begin teaching us this year?

Would it be possible for my school to arrange online classes with a teacher from a different IB school or with IB qualifications in general?

I want to know this before I reach out to my coordinator so that I can make a stronger case towards establishing such a new class (The IB call center staff is no longer considered to be a good info source after they told me of things contrary to the basic regulations doc).

I know I could try to learn another language for creativity, but that's hard to do since I would  have to study German in addition and for me getting an ok grade in German is currently more time consuming then keeping up 6's in all other subjects.

Thank you for your help in advance!

[Nomenclature 204]

Talk to your school's administration. Bottom line, if they don't want to hire a teacher; they don't have to and that's just how the cookie crumbles.

Also, Language B courses assume exposure of 2 years of a language prior to the course beginning. If you have no exposure to the language, ab Initio would probably be ideal. Also, I doubt your German will give you a significant advantage with Russian.

Pajoma, the official IB online course provider, doesn't offer Russian or Japanese courses.

I don't know what you want to do, and it's true there are far more Spanish speakers in the U.S. than any other second language, but before the U.S. State Department was dismantled by Rex Tillerson in 2017 (citation needed), Spanish was a pretty useful language to get a line of work there. 

[SC2Player 100]

I myself started a Further math 'class' (a weird one-person 'class') at my school simply by asking my math teacher and showing that I had the ability to undertake such a course. We also have had many students in the past teaching themselves languages and other subjects not offered at our school. In each case, our librarian (not an IB teacher) would look after such students, who learned the material from other sources (not necessarily online IB teachers), so I don't think you even need an IB qualified teacher (although don't quote me on this, and it would definitely help a lot to have one).

With that said, my school is pretty accommodating in regards to such requests, and I'm not too sure about your school's policies. If they say no, I'm afraid you may have to comply. 

[Gaby 707]

If your school is in Poland, it will be far easier to find you a Russian teacher than a Japanese teacher. If you can find people interested in studying it, and bring it up with the school administration, if they're flexible enough, they should be able to get you a Russian teacher to come in for a few hours a week fairly easily. For example, my school had like 2 or 3 Ukrainian students, and had an Ukrainian teacher come in just for them to do Ukrainian A. They had to pay extra for it, though (it was a private school). 

[random_savage 2]

Thanks for your imput everyone! I might talk to one of the teachers to see if it would be possible to try to implement the solution SC2Player was talking about. Otherwise I'll try to hunt down all the people interested in one of the language's for groups 2 or 6 (or for the 7th optional outside of diploma course) as Gabi said. I looked through the schools in Poland and one in Wroclaw offers Japanese ab initio- but I haven't found any with Russian (tside of A lang) which was pretty suprising.

Nomenclature, thank you for your imput as well. I thought Russian would be relatively easy as I know Polish at almost A level, I have no experience in German. Maybe the DoS still needs Spanish speaker's but I'm trying to get a job in a specific agency which requires security clearance and is subject to the Defense Language Instuture and they clearly state they have enough German and Spanish speaking people.

[kw0573 1,084]

6 hours ago, random_savage said:

I might talk to one of the teachers to see if it would be possible to try to implement the solution SC2Player was talking about.

Further Math is different because there is no IA component. That means if students want to self-study the subject, you don't really need a math teacher to to grade IAs. Also because there's mostly just one right answer, the teacher can easily grade any tests by seeing if answers match. That will be much harder for Language B.

Another option is to go for Classical languages: Ancient Greek/Latin, in which translation is emphasized over utilization of the language. Dictionary is allowed in half the assessments. 

[random_savage 2]

Ok, I went and asked one of the teacher and he said it should be ok as long as I find a teacher/tutor willing to cooperate with my school. So everything worked out fine. Once again, thanks everyone!