Students in Raji Swaminathan’s Gr. 7 science class used computer software to perform an experiment on static and kinetic friction on Sept. 21. “Students used a Vernier dual range force sensor and LoggerPro software to study and graph static and kinetic friction acting when a wooden block with a one-kilogram mass is pulled,” Swaminathan said. “They learn that a static friction force acting in the opposite direction increases to match their pulling force.” Static friction is what holds an object in place, such as a wooden block on a ramp, while kinetic friction occurs when two objects move against one another, such as a sled moving downhill.
“Furthermore, there is a maximum static friction force possible for two given surfaces in contact and they see that when they overcome that max static friction, the block starts moving,” Swaminathan said. “The graph that they plot helps them to see that the kinetic friction is smaller than the max static friction.” Their experiments also showed them that when the applied force on the block is equal to the opposing friction force, it moves at a constant velocity, and the block will accelerate if the applied force is greater than the opposing friction force.
Middle school cross country runners have posted some impressive results, reports coach Scott Graham. In the first meet of the year, held at Hyde Middle School, Alexandra Dellar, Gr. 6, placed fourth. Gr. 7 girls Alyssa Amick and Gabi Gupta took fourth and eighth, respectively. Claudia Tischler, Gr. 8, was tenth for the girls and Nicholas Navarro, Gr. 8, placed fifth for the boys.
The team continued to show strength in all grades at the Rolling Hills meet, where Dellar placed third and Calvin Kocienda, Gr. 6, took fourth. Amick came in fourth, and Corey Gonzalez, Gr. 7, was seventh. For the eighth graders, Tischler was first for the girls and Navarro took seventh place for the boys. There are just three more regular season meets to go, so come out and cheer on the team! The next meet is Thurs., Sept. 24, at JD Morgan Park in nearby Campbell.
On Sept. 18, Raji Swaminathan’s Gr. 7 science students performed an experiment in speed, velocity and motion, and also studied Newton’s laws of motion. “This lab helps students to investigate motion such as walking at a constant velocity away or towards a sensor, speeding up or slowing down and standing at rest,” Swaminathan said. “They use a Vernier motion detector and LoggerPro software to achieve this.” Students first made a prediction of different types of motion graphically and tried to simulate their predictions on the computer and see how closely they matched. “This lab helps them to understand that on a position-versus-time graph, a straight line going up or down represents constant velocity, a horizontal line is when a student is at rest and a curve represents changing speed.” The students also learned that walking more quickly creates a steeper slope on the graph, which helps them to understand that the slope of the position-versus-time graph indicates speed.
Gr. 7 students began the school year with a splash, spending an afternoon at the Saratoga campus’ Singh Aquatics Center on Aug. 31. About 50 students had some fun in the waning summer sun and enjoyed pizza, watermelon and cookies while chatting about their summer and back-to-school moments. Lifeguards on duty were Keith Hirota, MS social studies teacher; Anthony Wood, Gr. 4-5 assistant athletic director; and Michael Leonard, assistant varsity volleyball coach.
The Blackford gym filled with students, parents and coaches from Gr. 6-12 on Aug. 26 to meet, mingle and obtain information on sports programs and each other. Although fall practices are already under way for upper school athletes and middle school students will soon begin practices, all Harker athletes from Gr. 6-12 had an opportunity to meet their coaches, regardless of season. Gr. 6 boys Zachary Clausen, Nathaniel Stearns, Connor Powers and Spencer Powers were all excited for soccer to start, and were particularly looking forward to “beating St. Joseph’s again!” Explaining their passion, Stearns said, “Last year, we tied them 3-3 and beat them once.” This year, in addition to soccer, Clausen will play flag football and “maybe basketball.” Stearns will also play flag football, basketball and possibly baseball. Both Powers boys also plan on playing tennis.
Athletes Shireen Moshkelani and Ava Rezvani, both Gr. 11, put their names on the soccer sign-up sheet “with an asterisk saying we’re going to play when we’re seniors.” Anticipating a busy junior year, both volleyball players say they are “being good Harker students and planning our futures.” Priya Sadhev, also Gr. 11, plans on playing both soccer and varsity water polo this year, sports she has played for the past two years. She is thinking about playing water polo in college.
“I really like the dynamics of the sport, how you can foul people really hard under water,” Sadhev explained. In soccer, the closeness of the team is a plus. “I just like the team, how we all just really try hard together.”
Amy Rorabaugh, Gr. 12, is also an enthusiastic soccer player who will play both soccer and volleyball this year, as she has the past three years. She says the volleyball team is looking good this year, and “I think it’s going to be a fun season!”
After meeting coaches and catching up with each other, students and parents then met with the appropriate athletic director. Theresa Smith, Gr. 4-8 athletic director, and Dan Molin, US athletic director, each met with the athletes and parents from their divisions and presented an overview of the yearly sports offerings as well as other information regarding sports participation and safety issues. Following their presentations, there was a short college recruiting presentation by Rick Wire, a nationally-known speaker from Dynamite Sports. Let the seasons begin!
For 10 days students researched, wrote, edited and took photographs, and finished up designing news pages. Nineteen intrepid, aspiring middle school journalists gathered this summer for the second edition of Harker Summer Program’s Camp Chronicle. And, proof of the fun students had, on the final day of the two-week Zoom course, several mused on how it would be wonderful to have a longer class so that they could put out more issues.
Their two-week course saw the young scribes evolve from novice reporters to putting out two issues of “The Squeaky Pen,” with 10 sections and 18 pages each, in the process learning how to be newspaper reporters, editors, photographers and graphic designers. They learned what kinds of questions to ask, how the “lede’’ and the “kicker’’ (intriguing opening and closing sentences) on stories are vitally important to keep the reader’s interest, why revisions are so crucial, how to fact-check articles to make sure there are no errors, grammatical or in the content, and how to add attribution to stories.
The editors for each section (everything from Harker Summer Program news to local and state to business and tech) were in charge of designing their pages, making sure font size and design meshed with the other sections, and also worked with the reporters to find photos and graphics to go with the articles. Taught by Kate Murphy, Gr. 8 English teacher and former freelance writer, the class was modeled after a course from her college master’s program.
Students saw a professional staff at work when they toured the San Jose Mercury News offices, where they impressed the guide with thoughtful questions and focus as they watched reporters and editors at work. Students saw the massive presses turning out the day’s paper and the “robots’’ that retrieve the massive rolls of newsprint from huge warehouses to keep the presses stocked with paper.
It was a fitting field trip to nourish nascent aspirations and several students who attend Harker during the regular school year said they are motivated to volunteer for the MS newspaper’s staff!
This summer, Harker math students took on a writing project. Teacher Margaret Harris’ pre-algebra class wrote letters to the publisher of their textbook regarding some errors and received a response from the publisher thanking them.
In their letters, the students carefully explained which problems contained errors by describing the mathematical principles involved. According to Harris, “The students were careful to be polite and considerate as they, too, understand mistakes.”
Harris became aware of the errors when students questioned the solutions. “Believing in my students, I checked out the questions myself and the students were correct. I encouraged them to write their corrections to the publisher,” she added.
Katherine Tang, Gr. 6, even went so far in her letter as to explain how she thought the publisher achieved the incorrect answer. “On the answer key you got the wrong answer because I think you forgot to subtract 1s2 from 8s2.” She said she felt like “I was a mathematician. I felt respected and learned a lot.”
Tom Hamilton, supervising editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, replied in an e-mail to Kelly Espinosa, director of summer programs. “I wanted to express our appreciation to Ms. Harris and the students for bringing these errors to our attention. Both errors will be corrected in the next printing of the book. We appreciate the efforts of all the teachers and students who help us achieve this goal (of providing mathematically accurate materials).”
Anika Krishnan, Gr. 7, said that writing the letters was a good idea so “other people would not get stuck on the same problems.” Arman Mortasavi, Gr. 7, agreed, and added, “I felt closer to the math world because I helped to make the changes.” Annika Jackson, Gr. 7, didn’t expect a response, but thought they would fix the mistakes. Huck Vaughan, Gr. 7, said he was surprised that the publishers didn’t send an automatic e-mail response. “I helped out the pros!” Vaughan exclaimed.
Although these students enjoyed doing tessellations, meeting new people and learning new math concepts, this experience was definitely not one they expected to occur in a summer math class. As Leela Amladi, Gr. 6, explained, “I didn’t expect it to be such a big deal, I just didn’t want others to be stuck on those problems. It’s like we corrected Grand Masters!”
Tennis in the MS has grown in confidence and stature, overcoming opponent after opponent on their way to winning two league championships – the WBAL (West Bay Athletic League) and the MTP (Mid-Peninsula Tennis Patrons). Building a winning team has been a challenging task for head coach KV Ganesh and assistant coach Cyrus Castillo, but one that they have taken on every bit of the way.
“Middle school tennis is about a sport where a lot of individual talent exists and the focus is to get these individuals to play in a team environment,” says Ganesh. Tryouts spanned several days. “This year we had 72 middle school boys and girls tryout for the 25 spots in the team,” says Ganesh, “and the team has 18 players who have a USTA ranking, the most we have seen all these years.” This year’s team was Niharika Bedekar, Pranav Bheda, Neel Bhoopalam, Josh Bollar, Jenny Chen, Simar Mangat, Nikhil Panu, Piyush Prasad, Chau Nguyen, Indica Sur, Justin Yang, all Gr. 8; Vikas Bhetanabhotla, Katia Mironova, Avinash Nayak, Sahithya Prakash, Ariana Shulma, all Gr. 7; and Neel Bedekar, Vikram Chari, Deepa Dhore, John Dobrota, Srivinay Irrinki, Ethan Ma, Ryan Palmer, Sriram Somasundaram, Vedant Thyagaraj, all Gr. 6.
Although the season started with a narrow defeat, Harker quickly settled down into a rhythm and remained undefeated for the rest of the regular season in both leagues. Having qualified to play in the Silver Division for the WBAL, the Eagles went on to claim the WBAL championships with two more victories in that league.
In the 20-year history of the MTP League, Harker’s best achievement has been as a “runner-up” in 2007. This time around the Eagles were more determined than ever to have their name on that championship trophy. They advanced through each round in the face of ever-growing competition. On May 26 they posted a convincing 7-2 victory over Bret Harte, whom they had lost to in the finals just a couple of years ago. The mood in the Eagles camp was ecstatic – they enjoyed every bit of ending the season on this high note!
The coaches had little difficulty in naming Chen as the Most Valuable Player. Having been a part of the singles quartet for all three years, she was there against every one of Harker’s opponents this season. Chari was undefeated this season and walked away with the Eagles Award. Nayak received the Coaches’ Award for his inspirational display of team spirit on and off court. He helped keep the team together through tough times.
Coach Ganesh extended his thanks to Harker’s administration and support staff for providing the facilities and transportation to the team. He hastened to add, “I particularly want to thank all the parents of the team for the support they provided and the sacrifices they made to help our team with their achievements during this season of two championships!”
Writing can be a lonely pastime. Often those scattered students who have an ink-stained bedroom corner don’t know about each other and don’t have an audience for their most imaginative words. But get a group of writers together and something different happens: collaboration, excitement, synergy. This connection of like minds can been seen at the meetings of the Harker Creative Writing Club, and it was alive in full force at the Celebration of Creative Writing that took place in the Blackford MPR in mid-May.
Standing at the microphone with a backdrop of paintings and sculptures from the recent student art exhibit, students Hannah Gorelik and Alice Tsui, both Gr. 8, read an excerpt of the novel the girls are writing in alternating chapters, a murder mystery set on a cruise ship. Also from the MS, Simon Orr, Gr. 8, with his made-for-radio voice, shared his quirky short story, “Under the Plum Tree.” This story, which was one of the two works selected to represent Harker in the California Young Writers competition, is a fable concerning a summer almost-romance between the narrator and a lovely young genius at CSI, aka “geek camp.” On an even more exotic note, Preston Yeung, Gr. 8, read a story he had completed in a mad rush at 11:37 the night before, where a space traveler is warned by tentacled, squid-like creatures about earth’s coming environmental collapse. Poets Oishi Banerjee, Gr. 7 and David Grossman, Gr. 8, rounded out the MS offerings. Banerjee read lyric poems about a garden and with a feminist theme. Grossman shared two poems recounting historic battles and a third one with a more subtle kind of conflict, where a mother has an unwanted glimpse of her son’s potential for cruelty.
Returning from the US to their old Blackford haunts were writers Bridget Nixon, Kaitlin Halloran, Nandita Krishna and Antonia Ipser, all Gr. 9 and Melanie Herscher, Gr. 11. Herscher, who is working on a screenplay, genially coerced some audience members into playing the parts in her royal romance. Nixon, displaying a facility for accents, read a dialog between two train travelers which becomes heated over the topic of women’s rights. Halloran and Krishna both read short, comic pieces. Halloran’s was full of fast-paced, witty digressions, and Krishna’s was more in her famously dry, deadpan mode, with the writer’s large, innocent-looking brown eyes suggesting no responsibility for her own sardonic words. Young dynamo Ipser founded the US’s Writing Club, which is advised by English teacher Erin Redfern, after graduating out of the similar club at the MS. Ipser, whose return to the MS provoked excited cries from several members of the audience, was unusually reticent in her turn at the mike. At the end of her too-brief offering, about a man who begins to have trouble distinguishing dreams from reality, an audience member yelled out, “More!”
The writers and several members of the audience agreed that more is needed, and not just from Ipser. All who participated hope to make these readings an annual or even semiannual event. As anyone who attended could tell, Harker has some startlingly accomplished young writers. The writing club, however, is for raw work and students do not need to have any special experience with writing to join. Club members share their latest creations at meetings to gain comments from each other, and also respond to writing prompts designed to take their thoughts in new directions. If a writer has a fresh story or poem and wants to hear what others think right away, he or she can post it on the club’s Athena page for responses. In the past, some members who could not attend the meeting times have participated solely through Athena.
The Creative Writing Club needs new voices. The club is, to quote author Anne Dillard, for the lucky ones “who wish to build castles with words… to create a place where imagination can wander.” Does that sound like you?