My Students

Where do I start talking about Summerbridge? I guess it would have to begin with the students.

In the States, the students in Breakthrough Collaborative (Summerbridge is the old name, but Summerbridge Hong Kong has retained it) are most likely middle-schoolers who are highly motivated but come from lower-income homes. They’re extremely bright 12-15-year-olds, who are interested in learning various academic subjects at a higher-level than they’re getting in their schools (mostly math, science, English, and/or a foreign language).

Our students are not those students. Of course, they’re still bright, highly motivated, and come from lower-income homes, but our focus for what they’re learning is completely different. Our students are, many of them, recent immigrants from China, which means that even though they are as advanced as anyone else in their age group in most academic subjects, their English is not that good. And in Hong Kong, your English must be a certain level for you to continue on to Form 6 (senior year of high school). These students, when they move here, are placed into Form 2 (7th or 8th grade). But since they usually go to schools where Cantonese is the Main language of Instruction (CMI), they have a hard time catching up in English. Think of it as any bad language program you’ve ever been to. Did you come out of it speaking that language? Or did you just kind of flounder until a better teacher came along?

Summerbridge aims to fix that. As a result, our students are older than the ones in the States, and while we may try to teach them advanced subjects, we have to attempt to use the simplest terminology in order to explain complicated subjects that they may already understand in Chinese. Imagine “dumbing down” your terms to converse with a foreign scientist, who understood everything there is to know about nuclear physics, but can’t necessarily communicate with you, in English, about it. Yeah, pretty difficult, right?

What this means, for me, is that my students are older than I thought. My subject matter is a little complex, I suppose (I’m just teaching all the random “fun” things there are in math, like fractals, weird geometry things, and math “tricks,” essentially), so I have returning students (students must commit to a two year program to learn English) who range in age from 15-19. The average age is 17, but I’m still a little nervous about teaching people who are older than me. We’ve been told not to tell them our exact age, since they may use that to question our authority. The good news is that the English ability of my students is higher than I thought, so I’ll be able to move at a decent pace with them, I think. Also, I have mostly older girls as students (okay, girls who are essentially my age), so I probably won’t have too much trouble with them. As long as I act authoritative (I am, after all, the teacher), then things will be fine.

Summerbridge is a student-centred program, which means that discussions ought to be run seminar-style, and we want the teachers to be talking as little as possible. Therefore, a lot more work has to go into lesson plans. It’s easy to just lecture a room full of students. It’s much harder to come up with interactive activities that cater to many different learning styles, all the time. I’m going to have to be super creative!

ETA after Student Orientation Day: My students are awesome, even if not all of them can show up for class. Yay students!