I heard about the Peninsula Bridge program when I was in high school. I had friends who worked as TAs and they always had great experiences. Once I got to college and started learning about the summer slip and how that disproportionately impactslow-income students, I wanted to get involved.
Bridge provides really personalized support. As a TA, I knew my students' strengths and weaknesses and was able to tailor each lesson to them. They got a lot of one-on-one support in order to scaffold their learning of important concepts and engage them more fully in exciting material. Peninsula Bridge is academically-rigorous and still fun place for low-income youth to spend their summers.
The kids at Bridge are great. I had this one student who struggled onher
pre-test — she didn’t really grasp the concept of how to write a
summary paragraph. But she was motivated. Over the course of 5 weeks, we
wrote a dozen summary paragraphs on interesting articles, and each of
hers was better than the next because she really listened to all of my
advice and incorporated each new tool into her writing. It took lots of
different learning tools to
“get” each concept — sometimes we’d
illustrate the article before we wrote about it and other times she’d
talk out the main points to me as she wrote, but because we were in
small groups, we could. Well, she ended up with the highest score in the
class on her post-test. I was really proud of her growth and those
skills will be with her forever.
I realized how much I enjoyed
being with these kids and how much I want
to be a part of making sure
they have a chance at a really high-quality
education