IBO Members Visiting Gymnasium in Banja Luka

Something interesting was happening in the Gymansium on the 18th of April, volunteers from the UWC (United World Colleges) and the IBO (International Baccalaureate Organization),Hajja from the Maldives and Joonas from Finland, presented and explained to the students and their parents, the basics of the IBO programme, as well as its advantages and disadvantages,. During the presentation, which lasted about an hour, the IBO coordinator in the Gymansium teacher Rastko Vukovic and a former student,now a succesful UWC graduate in Norway, addressed the audience. The experiences which the UWC graduates shared with the present students, forced a lot of them to imagine themselves, at least for a moment, in an education programme like this.(unfortunately, for a big number of them it finished only on imagining.) However, the good news are that from September, the students will have the opportunity to educate themselves in consent with the IBO programme ,in the Gymanzium. You probably noticed that here are mentioned the IBO and the UWC,and that obviously these are two different things. Yes,that’s right! The IBO is an international matriculation programme, which involves a two year curriculum.There are six groups of subjects (…………) and from each one of those groups the students attend one subject. The students can attend three or four subjects on the higher level, three being the minimal and four the maximal number, while all the other subjects are on the the standard level. The students would also attend Theory of Knowledge classes, which have the goal to animate the students deduction about knowledge and experience that they gain in and out of the classroom.During the compulsory CAS programme (Creativity,Action,Service),the IBO educates complete individuals, because CAS activities develop: the students conscience about themselves, about care for other people and their ability to cooperate with others. As a part of the ending year of the matriculation programme,every student has to do an indepedent research and write an extended essay of 4000 words about the topic that the he/she is interested in. The IBO matriculation programme is practiced in 10 UWC Colleges and in more than 1200 schools in 110 countries all over the world and it offers the world’s most respectable diploma.
Hajja and Joonas explain the programme like this : ‘It all comes down to a smaller number of lectures (about 4 hours a day) and more independent research and hard work.Creativity and social work are extremely important in this programme, in fact they’re compulsory! Through different activities you enhance your abilities and knowledge, and in the same time it gives you great satisfaction, because when you hear ‘Thank you!’ from someone that needed your help, you feel incredible.’
The UWC Colleges are, with more than 40 years of experience, experts in the international education of students from different cultures. Currently there are over 10 UWC Colleges all over the world, which uniquely educate students with scholarships , from 16 to 19 years of age, from more than 100 countries, regardless of their religion ,nationality or financial position. In the period of two years (the period of their high school education) they live in dormitories and follow the IBO programme. The students also participate in the challenging community service programme and in different cultural activities.
On the question about differences between the IBO and the UWC,Hajja and Joonas answer: ‘The only difference is that the UWC gathers students from more than 100 countries ,who live and educate themselves in a community for the next two years. The UWC follows the IBO programme and after graduation you get an IBO diploma.
The IBO is just an education programme, which can be, independently from the UWC, inducted into a school ,as it is the case with your school.
And while the induction of the IBO programme into the Gymnasium in Banja Luka is being prepared,in Mostar an UWC College is opening. ’Both should start functioning in September.’ , the officials say. There are going to be 45 vacancies for students in the Gymnasium (as I unofficially found out) and they will be placed in two classes. The lecturers will partially be foreigners and partially our professors,specially educated for the IBO programme.Over 5000 IBO examiners have the responsibility to externally evaluate the quality of the students work,therefore…the lecturers do not grade the students.All the classes are, of course, in English, as well as the exams. It is important to mention that these 45 ‘lucky’ students are going to be selected within the school and the conditions are: achievement in school up until then and knowledge of English.The IBO programme in the Gymansium is going to be based on the principle of self-financing.National Committees select the UWC students and all who are interested can find the application form on www.uwc-ibo.org. This year there are 66 scholarships for BiH (60-Mostar, 2-USA, 2-Italy, 1-Norway, 1-Hong Kong).The condition for the UWC scholarship is an excellent achivement in school, participation in different extra-curricular activities and groups, and average knowledge of English. The important thing to emphasize is that the UWC includes the last two years of high school education, so those who want to apply this year should be in their second year of secondary school. If you still have second thoughts,maybe the words of those who alredy went through all this, are going to help. Hajja: ‘The knowledge I possess, I don’t owe just to the school and lectures ,but also to the people who were around me for those two years.You fit in and get used to living with people from the completely opposite side of the world incredibly fast and the things that you learn have no value…share your experiences and by doing that broaden your horizons.’ Joonas:’The most important thing is that you know how to use your knowledge in real life ,because you’re not overburdened with facts and theory…the practical part is much more important.’ After they finish volunteering in BiH, Hajja and Joonas are going to attend Universities in the USA.
The students of the Gymnasium also presented them their school and all the activities that the Gymnasium participated in.The guests were impressed and they said that was a proper example of creativity and activity that the IBO programme supports.
So, even if you stay here, different activities and groups in the Gymnasium, will offer you the atmosphere of a high standard ,European school.
• Tijana Trkulja I7

German Drama Course
Our German drama course came into being because of our love for this language. In our group there are eleven members, students of 2nd and 4th grade. The texts we perform are written usually by the members or we just rewrite the original work. With these dramma texts we represented school on several book fairs and smal inosts and were very successful. So far we did two different plays, the first one is about a man on a court of law and he is being judged by animals; and the other one is Goethe's "Sorrows of young Werter", which was written by one of our members and translated in German by another. The person who made all this possible is our mentor, German language teacher, but also our friend Ana Cabric.

English Drama Course
Our English drama course came into being because of our love fot this language. In our group there are eleven members, students of 2nd and 4th grade. The texts we perform are written usually by the members or we just rewrite the original work. With these drama texts we represented school on several book fairs and Smal Inosts and were very successful, we also had a performance in the theater and all tickets were sold, there were arround 250 people. So far we did three different plays, the first one was a parody on Shakespeare's "Hamlet", rewritten by our English teacher, the second was fairytail mess which was written by a member of our group and the last one is at Newark airport. The person who made all this possible is our mentor, English language teacher,but also our friend Andrijana Stokic-Penda.

THE ANGLISTIC CULTURE GROUP
The Anglistic Culture Group or as it is popularly referred to as ’the English group’, was formed last September, under the coordination of our English teacher Nataša Nikic. The aim of this section is to help us, the students, in finding out more about the English language, culture, the way of life and anything that we might find interesting, but we can’t find out on our regular classes due to the lack of time in regular teaching process. Basically, we are meeting to talk about all aspects of English – not just the language as many might assume. The meetings are held in the language classroom every weekend, where we can use various equipment, such as a computer, TV, video and stereo, which largely help us in our researches. Since September we had several projects, like music, which was the first and most successful one. Afterwards we did quite a lot of projects, including Britain, America and some other English speaking countries, British and Irish traditional music, the Eurovision Song Contest, film, computers, aliens and some other topics. Mostly, our emphasise is on Britain, but we do not have an exlusive policy of researching Britain only. During the week each member carries out individual or group research on the given topic and on our meetings at the end of the week we present our gathered information in form of presentation, followed by group dialog and discussion, where everyone can participate and say what they know about the topic. The supervising professor also participates in the discussion and she helps us in finding new projects and new ideas for the research we are doing. I would also like to mention that we had a round table at the end of the first semester where we had a discussion about the Youth Leadership Program in which we participated and which is organised by the Government of the USA every year. We are also going to have another round table and we are also planning a debate at the end of school, in May or June. Also I would like to mention, that for now, the group has 10 members which all attend the second year. We hope we will have more members next school year, from the first classes and possibly from the second ones. That would be the most basic information about our group, and we hope that we showed you what we are trying to do there.
• Deana Racic, II4
• Sanja Subotic, II4
• Slaviša Mijatovic, II8

Sports and recreation – Volleyball
It was my assignment to present our school’s sports section, that is our school’s volleyball section. We have lots of after school activities where students show their skills. However there was a volleyball competition last year in our school for each class. After our little championship students from 4th grade decided to present that event on the internet. Their younger friends who wanted to help them had themselves involved in that action and site was complete. I had also participated in that actionAs a team we went to the city high school volleyball championship. We decided to help some more people join our section or start training volleyball so we made a web page about volleyball where we put some of the rules, exercises and lots of other stuff on volleyball. I was also to tell our guests something about the Saint Sava celebration that we held in our school and the prize-winning essay that I wrote on the topic of 'Spirituality And Constituency Of Saint Sava And Saint Simeon'. Bojana Marjanovic II4 of the school year 2005/06

OTHER ACTIVITIES
- DEBATING CLUB „CASTRA“ -
The debating club „Castra“ was founded in March 2001 by our history professor Zoran Pejašinovic and since then we had remarkable results. In 2003 and 2004 we were the national champions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and we had 2 of our debaters participating in the World Championship – in 2003 in Slovenia (Marija Jokic) and in 2004 in Estonia (Jelena Jokic). We have also participated in several debating camps in Neum and Sarajevo, we had TV debates every year since the grounding of the club and this year we are going on a TV debate in Sarajevo in May. Last year we had debaters from Gracanica come to debate against us, and now we are preparing to host the debaters from the newly formed debating club in Prnjavor. On the debate meetings we do different types of debates, we practice our speaking skills and learn how to express ourselves in a better way. Today we have around 10 members and we are expanding every year with new students applying to our school. Anyone who wants to join the club is more than welcome.
• Slaviša Mijatovic, II8

Multimedia group
I guess you are all wondering what is the so called "Multimedia group"? Well it's a school organization that expresses students' talents in certain disciplines like journalism, , computer graphics, programming, web programming... For example I'm a part of the web-design team, which has, during the past few years created a number of websites, like znanje.org, enovine.net, which have more than 5000 visits a day. Also I would like to mention a project made by group of ex-students, the so called "Kulturom protiv droge", or the translated version "Culture vs Drugs", which has organized many plays, concerts and volunteer actions during the past two years of its existence. Besides these, following the reformation and modernization of our educational system, we have created a series of interactive educational cd-s, from which I'll mention a few latest: Front Page, HTML, PhotoshopCS, MathCad, and also made a few tutorials for the programming languages we study on our computer science classes, the previously mentioned HTML, Basic and Pascal. Apart from the creative one, we also have support role. We provide digital assistance for both professor and student presentations. Our mentors have published more then 30 books on many different topics, such as: mathematics, physics, computer science and many other. Apart from the school we have participated on the Banja Luka book fair and the Inost fair, both 2004 and 2005; on which we won many prizes in the categories for the best presentation, the most imaginative stand and the most charming personnel award.
• Sasa Tepic II4


The project “Culture Against Drugs”
We'd like to present you the innovative teaching of Serbian language and the plays done as part of the project Culture against Drugs. It all began about three years ago when we included a new, interactive way of teaching with our Serbian language teacher Vera Bajagic. The whole concept is based on a very close cooperation of students with the teacher. Each class has its student-coordinator who makes a plan for each class, i.e. giving assignments to students. That way students aren't overburdened and each class carries out their duties successfully. The other part of the curriculum is consisted of a special approach to interpretation of literature masterpieces in which we try to make them close to students' understanding by using role-plays, music, paintings, dancing and whatever we find suitable and useful for their better understanding of novels and poems. As part of that we organized special classes for interpretation of works of our great poem writers – Aleksa Santic and Milan Rakic. We produced a play based on Moliere's Le misanthrope. And probably the work we're proudest of is our parody on Shakespeare's classic Romeo and Juliet. We called our parody Rade and Jela and set the scene in a village near where two families have gotten into a very serious quarrel because the young man's family's cow moved into a pasture of the other family and ate everything. In response to that they took the cow and that's why our love couple, Rade and Jela, cannot be together. After many hilarious scenes we top off the play by an agreement between the two families in which Jela's family allows her to get married to Rade if his family gives them the cow. So, they swapped their daughter for a cow. The first play in this project was “One work day of High scholar”. This play was performed on Book exhibit in Banja Luka, in some Primary schools in Banja Luka, then in Primary school Jorgos Papanderu in Aleksandrovac, in III high school in Osijek and, of course in our school. Another play that was performed for the first time last year was “The Troubles of Young Verter”. This play was performed on Book exhibit and in our school. Many students took part in these plays, and participation in them was something special for participators. That way of working has proved very positive and effective, because students aren't overworked, all of them get an incredible comprehension of literature and every class is interesting for both, the students and the teacher. Najava engleski i njemacki: Now we have with us English and German drama course and here are two members of this group to tell us something more about their work and their future plans.
Najava engleski i njemacki:
Now we have with us english and german dramma course and here are two members of this group to tell us something more about their work and their future plans.