20150806.0541

The summer bridge program wraps up today, which means this afternoon will be filled with frantic grading so that I can get paperwork put together and submitted to the program administration. Students are not receiving grades, as such, but whether or not they receive scholarship money will depend on their evaluated performance, and I believe higher-scoring and more diligent students are eligible for other awards, as well. I am not sure about that. I am sure, however, that working with the students in it has been a good experience, and I could wish to see some of them in my classes in the upcoming term. Such is not to be, unfortunately, but it would have been good to have them again.

The program is a good thing, I think. Having the additional grounding in basic curricula that it offers seems like it will be helpful for students. Having the advance notice of things will, as well, and I cannot help but believe that coming in three weeks ahead will help the students in the program break the post-high-school inertia I see among many incoming students in the first weeks of the term. Hell, even I have to struggle to come back up to speed, and I'm good at the college thing--and it's not as if I took the summer off. But working on my own schedule (or, rather, a combination of mine and Ms. 8's, since when I can work depends on when she will let me) is a different thing than meeting with regularly scheduled classes, and answering to a department and administration is far different than answering to a single, usually happy client. In any event, if even I suffer some strain at starting up again, surely the less-trained incoming students will suffer far more of it--but the bridge program at least mitigates that strain. For that alone, if for no other reason, I should thank it.

I have noted that the program relies on outside funding, problematic as it may be. In that same note, I assert that expanding the program would be good; I maintain the truth of it. It is not only students in engineering, architecture, and technology who benefit from having crash-courses in fundamental subjects and what amount to plenary lectures discussing various majors in their college. I could have stood to have such a thing--although I admit I would not have benefited as much as could be, given the particular way I was a stubborn ass at the time. (I did not go to college to make friends, although it happened to some extent. I am largely out of contact with the people I met there, though, to my regret. Now, more than ten years out, I feel it too late to try to reconnect.) Others in the humanities could, as well. Having a sense of where things fit together in the spectra of human knowledge is beneficial, and those in the humanities would benefit from some grounding in STEM disciplines no less than those in STEM disciplines benefit from grounding in the humanities, as my summer bridge teaching suggests. How such a thing could come to be, however, I am unsure.