KEITH BROOKS, a student at Summerbridge Cambridge, performs on pots and pans. Several Harvard students and others offer instructions to local middle schoolers through the program. See story, page 3.

A miserable midsummer storm—gray, hot and humid—presses against the windows of the Tobin Elementary School cafeteria as students weave through the tables, unwrapping breakfast muffins and small containers of juice as they slide into their seats.

Conversational murmur swells slightly as more arrive and claim their meals.

Suddenly the students sitting around one table beat a rhythm in unison on its surface.

“We’ve got spirit, yes we do! We’ve got spirit—how ’bout you?” they shout in chorus, pointing at a neighboring table on the snap of the last syllable. The commotion has turned nearly every head in the room, and now without an instant’s hesitation the neighboring students repeat the chant, their fingers pointing in a new direction.

The chanting continues until conversation subsumes it again. A burst of cheering from the school’s main entrance upstairs heralds the arrival of a new middle-schooler.

It is Tuesday morning at Summerbridge Cambridge, a local program offering 88 middle-school students at local public schools opportunities to develop academic skills under the tutelage of 42 high school and college students.

The summer program, which runs from late June through mid-August, is part of a two-year curriculum combining intensive summer courses with term-time classes in literature, social studies, mathematics and science. The program is funded by a combination of private donation and federal support, so students can enroll for free.

Held at two Cambridge sites, the program aims to introduce middle-school students to the sort of academic environment they will find in high school, says Program Director Hilary Mead.

Five Harvard undergraduates are among those teaching at the Tobin Elementary site.

Sarah R. Maxwell ’06, who teaches a four-person class on forensic science, says she spent the first weekend of the program doing nothing but planning her classes for the next week, she says.

“The intensity is kind of what’s fun,” she says.

Teaching middle-school students requires imagination, she says.

“In college lectures you’re mostly going to sit and listen for an hour,” she says. “These kids don’t do that. They want to figure things out for themselves. They’re concrete thinkers.”

Getting In and Getting Ready

Classes in the summer program are held in different rooms of the Tobin building—even though most middle school students take all their classes in a single room—to help students grow accustomed to movement between classes, she explains.