Last Friday, the middle school invited guest speaker Andy Lulka to the first Windows and Mirrors assembly. This new series of events is meant to be a “window” through which people can view communities and cultures different from theirs, and a “mirror” for people who belong to them.
Lulka, a Jewish woman who was born in Mexico, shared some of her family history with the community, detailing the journey her grandparents and great-grandparents made to Mexico from their respective countries of origin. Her great-grandparents on her mother’s side headed to Mexico after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Because they spoke a hybrid of Hebrew and Spanish, they believed they would have an easier time adjusting to Mexican society. On her father’s side, her grandparents’ family escaped the pogroms in Russia and arrived in Mexico after being turned away by Canada and the United States.
She also discussed the differences between Jewish communities in Mexico and those in North America. “You have a huge Jewish community in the U.S. In Mexico, there’s about 50,000 Jewish people, and that’s in a country of 125 million,” she said. Communities in Mexico, she explained, also are mostly of the orthodox denomination.
Lulka, now residing in Toronto, also talked about some of the differences between Jewish communities in Canada and Mexico. “Canada is a much smaller country in terms of population than Mexico, so we make up a much bigger portion of the population,” she said. “We tend to integrate more into our population whereas in Mexico it’s a very closed community.”
Since Friday evening marked the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Lulka took some time to explain the importance of the holiday and the traditions associated with it, including the activities in the month leading up to the new year, such as the daily sounding of the shofar, fashioned from a ram’s horn, and the Tashlikh, in which a person’s sins are atoned by symbolically casting them into a flowing body of water.
Today, eighth grader Anika Pallapothu was named one of the top 30 finalists in the 2020 Broadcom MASTERS program. Her project, titled “Predict Using AI: Diagnosing of Diabetic Eye Diseases Using Convolutional Neural Networks for Computer Vision,” details how artificial intelligence can be used to detect diabetic retinopathy, the disease that is the leading cause of blindness. As a finalist, Pallapothu is eligible to participate in the Virtual Broadcom MASTERS event, which takes place Oct. 16-21.
——-
Sept. 3, 2020:
Yesterday, the Society for Science & the Public announced that 15 Harker students – a school record – are among the top 300 contestants in the 2020 Broadcom MASTERS program, one of the top middle school science competitions in the country. The Top 300 MASTERS entered the competition during the 2019-20 school year by being nominated at a science fair affiliated with the Society for Science & the Public.
Ninth graders Gautam Bhooma, Zachary Blue, Ramit Goyal, Jordan Labio, Ella Lan, Heidi Lu, Anika Maji, Anika Mantripragada and Ananya Sriram; eighth grader Anika Pallapothu; seventh graders Hubert Lau, Serena Lau, Brenna Ren, Kallie Wang and Carissa Wu each received a prize package that includes $125 from DoD STEM and a subscription to Science News magazine. The 30 finalists in this year’s competition will be announced Sept. 16. The final stage of the competition is being held virtually this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In August, sixth grader Neel Kumar launched a series of free educational videos called “Effortless Java,” which are designed to help younger students learn how to code. He was partially inspired to create the series after completing an online course only to find out he was too young to receive certification. In addition, the platform he had planned to use to host his course disqualified him as a teacher on the basis of his age. Kumar hopes his videos will reach children around the world and give them a means to escape poverty. To support this effort further, he launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for Children International, a long-running humanitarian organization that works to help impoverished children.
The latest middle school campus construction update is now live! Join facility manager Mike Bassoni as he updates the community on the pumping and finishing of the concrete that will form the floor of the new classroom building.
The middle school Summer Institute’s Poets and Playwrights class offered students in grades 6-8 fun and engaging ways to learn about the many aspects of creating poetry and plays. Poetry was the focus of the first week of class, as students studied the work of Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and other famous poets. Students learned about different literary devices through fun exercises such as “puzzle poems,” where students read a poem and use what they’ve learned to determine what the poem is describing.
During week two, students learned the elements of playwriting by examining aspects of drama, reading and performing scenes and working together to write a scene. Samples from plays such as “Our Town” and “The Glass Menagerie” were used as examples of structure, and students then wrote scenes and acts for longer plays that they had the option of continuing to write once the class was over.
Three Harker students were named finalists in the 2020 ProjectCSGIRLS Competition. Rising freshman Reshma Kosaraju and rising eighth graders Saanvi Bhargava and Anika Pallapothu were invited to a virtual version of the ProjectCSGIRLS National Gala, to be held in early August.
In this annual contest, open to girls in grades 6-8, students use computer science and technology to build projects that address social problems in the categories of global health, safety, intelligent technology and inequality. The organization’s goal is to close the gender gap in computing and technology by fostering interest among middle school girls.
This summer, middle schoolers with a passion for scientific research enrolled in the Summer Science Research Society (SSRS), a class in which the students do individual research on topics of their interest and report on their findings. On the final day of the class, students present the results of their research to their classmates and parents. “This is an interest-based, student-driven project and I’m there to facilitate and guide them through the whole process,” said middle school science teacher Kathy Peng, who runs the SSRS.
Students begin by picking a topic and doing background research. They then design experiments to test their hypotheses. Rising eighth grader Abigail Samuel’s project involved using principles of chemistry to bake cookies, including testing how letting dough rest for different periods of time altered texture and flavor. Caden Ruan, a rising seventh grader, designed and built a small-scale version of a machine that picks up plastic waste in the ocean. Rising sixth grader Evan Yuan investigated a new way of making a plant-based hamburger.
Another important element of the class is learning how to present data. Students document the process with graphs and images, and present their research at a virtual symposium, explaining their research methods and conclusions.
Rising freshman Kabir Ramzan and rising sixth grader Ameera Ramzan have been working to raise funds in support of Black Girls Code and Second Harvest Food Bank. To encourage donations through their GoFundMe page, the siblings created a virtual music concert featuring themselves playing various pieces on piano, flute and violin. Two of the three instruments featured in the concert were taught to the Ramzans as part of the Harker music program. In addition, their company, ArtShackCrafts, will send a gift of an artisan bracelet for all donations over $50.
The two created ArtShackCrafts to sell artisan crafts to support philanthropic efforts about which they are passionate. These causes have included assisting detained immigrant children through the ACLU and aiding California wildfire victims through the American Red Cross.
In April, middle school librarian Bernie Morrissey hosted a video chat with author Rex Ogle, whose novel, “Free Lunch,” won the middle school’s first Tournament of Books, an event in which books were placed in a tournament bracket and voted on by students. Ogle, who previously worked in comics with stints at Marvel and DC, talked about how he became a writer, how long it takes him to write, his work in comics and his follow-up to “Free Lunch.” He also read from “a story in real time” that he has been writing about a middle schooler’s experience being quarantined during the COVID-19 pandemic. The entire chat is viewable via the embedded YouTube video.
Last week, middle school science teacher Tamar Hawk invited environmental activist Tiffany Duong ‘02 to speak with her students about careers in environmental advocacy. Duong, who attended Harker from first grade through grade 12 and was a member of the upper school’s first graduating class, delivered an overview of how she became interested in environmental issues and how her career changed in the ensuing years. She discovered her love for the topic while attending an assembly on the rainforest as a fifth grader. “I wanted to be the person who was standing in front of the bulldozers at the Amazon,” she recalled.
After graduating from UCLA, Duong worked as a renewable energy lawyer, handling contracts and negotiations for solar arrays and wind turbine farms, including California’s Tehachapi Wind Farm and Ivanpah Solar Power Tower. Duong briefly discussed why more states don’t use renewable energy, explaining that issues such as cost and space are considerable hindrances. “There’s not always a storage capability for renewable energy, which makes it hard for some areas to utilize renewable energy,” she said. Politics, including lobbies from major industries, also play a large role. “A lot of people … don’t necessarily believe that climate change is even happening or that this is an issue,” she said.
Duong later discovered that she wanted to be closer to the environment she was working to save, and made a career switch. In 2016, she headed to the Peruvian Amazon, researching biodiversity along newly opened areas of the rainforest, documenting existing species and discovering new ones in order to prevent encroachment from miners and loggers. Her work in ocean advocacy began in 2017, as she helped in the effort to ban drift net fishing in California and tagged sharks in Costa Rica to provide evidence of migratory swimways in order to protect aquatic life. In 2018 she worked to restore coral reefs in the Florida Keys.
Duong continues to go on expeditions in addition to working as an environmental journalist. She advised the students that there is no single most effective way to be an advocate, using her own career as an example. “I’ve worked in law, policy, education and now media, and I think the most effective thing will be the one that you do,” she said. “Whatever you want to do, try it.”