Bridge Days at Providence

It sometimes seems like there is a chasm between classroom learning and real life.    We occasionally get questions like, “Why do we need to know this?” or “When are we ever going to use this in real life?”  This coming fall, we will work at bridging that chasm by starting “Bridge Days” at Providence. They will also be a great way to engage our students in real work – work that serves real people with a real need. 
On a typical day at Providence, students have four 80-minute periods where they study four different courses.  On a Bridge Day, students will spend the entire school day in one course.  We plan on four Bridge Days each semester – one for each course.  The Bridge Day might take the form of “field work,” where student learning and activities will take place off site, or the Bridge Day might stay on-site, but then we will be looking for ways to bring experts or community members into the school so that we’re still bridging student learning to the real world. 
Examples of Bridge Day work could include:

• Interviewing seniors in our community about the meaning of various psalms in their life for Bible 10
• Working with the Thames Valley Conservation Authority to carry out a project that will help protect and preserve the Thames River for Science 9
• Visiting local university campuses to interview university students about their viewpoints on some of the big questions we discuss in Philosophy 12
• Putting up an art display of student work in a local art gallery for Art 9
• Meeting with the few remaining students from the Mt. Elgin Industrial Institute (a residential school) to hear and pass on their story for Canadian History 10
• Planning, budgeting, and completing a building project for a community organization in Math 11C

It is important that our students engage in this kind of real work.  One Christian academic once said, “It is nothing but a pious wish and a grossly unwarranted hope that students trained to be passive and non-creative in school will suddenly, upon graduation, actively contribute to the formation of Christian culture.” If we want our students to be active and creative builders when they graduate, we need to be intentional about practicing that during school. 
Our students are well-situated within a community of school supporters and the wider community of Middlesex Centre.  There are lots of opportunities to reach out to people working in the field, experts in a specific area of study, or community members who would benefit from our service.  Bridge Days will be about using these connections to provide our students with an opportunity to do real work for real people with real needs.  Bridge Days will be an opportunity for our students to practice being active and creative, to practice actively contributing to building Christian culture.  And we expect that this will move us forward in our mission of preparing our students for a life of service in God’s Kingdom as ambassadors for Christ.  

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