Comments on: Summer Update: From Skyline to community college

By: Barbara Schmidt

Barbara Schmidt — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 23:03:50 +0000

I’m thrilled that Diamond likes taking college classes. I, too, wish that high school was more like college due to the variety of classes offered at a junior college or university because we might have less of a drop out rate in high school. I hope diamond keeps in touch with her previous teachers, especially in elementary school (5th grade), so she can speak in their classes and motivate the students.

By: John

John — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 18:03:59 +0000

I must say, I’m impressed with the quality of alternative young bloggers Katie has chosen to fill the gap in her absence.

By: Diamond Broussard

Diamond Broussard — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:36:54 +0000

I agree that summer school is run how public high school should. I find that I enjoy being challenged. So during the regular school year when things go much slower I get bored, and then I get lazy. I might continue to take at least one summer school course every summer until I graduate from college!

By: Nextset

Nextset — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:53:06 +0000

What I remember about the summer school classes is that the students I met there – who were from other school districts than my home district – were the same people I saw in College classes later and maybe a few I ran into later in Law School, in Bar Review and in practice years later (at least one or two in particular).

I went to summer school every year at Oakland Tech’s UC Berkeley managed summer school. I remember taking a year of biology one summer and physics the next.

The students at summer school were serious about their educational careers and that was different from the high school crowd who were not so serious. Summer school was an important tool to transition to college. The classes were run by UC grad students as if they were running a college course – but we had 2 instructors in every classroom of 24 rather than one instructor for 35 students at Berkeley for study group with a 1 to 500 ratio for college lectures.

And summer school was segregated – it excluded the dulls and the students who couldn’t cut it. Kind of like UC Berkeley. Summer School was run the way my high school should have been run. Tough and no excuses for anything – and the time flew by, we were completely engaged by the work and the attention. Public HS was more boring as they slowed everything down to the pace of the dullest students in the room.

It probably made a difference in my surviving college. Some of my relatives dropped out of UC, they didn’t have the summer school history and went to UC directly from public high schools and were in academic trouble fairly quickly.