The Harker Conservatory’s 2013-14 fall play, “Anon(ymous),” is loaded. It features an original score created by students, original choreography by students, Balinese shadow puppetry, a Bollywood dance, fog, smoke, lights, and an all-new audience configuration.
Then there is the content. “Anon(ymous)” is a new, gritty, mythic exploration into cutting-edge, modern-day political challenges. The piece blends Homer’s “The Odyssey,” the epic read by all Harker freshmen, with the diaspora story of an undocumented immigrant finding his way across America, searching for his identity and his family.
“’Anon(ymous)‘ is a celebration of tradition and culture,” writes the director, Jeff Draper. “The epic adventure story is based on Homer’s “The Odyssey,” but this retelling reveals universal themes about our own contemporary world. This play is about the love and connection infused in the family, a love that is found in every culture, all around the world.”
While the themes of “Anon(ymous)” may be ancient and universal, there is a lot that is new and mold-breaking for The Harker Conservatory. The play is a new one, written in the last few years — there is no Shakespeare here. The audience is arranged on either side of a runway, a configuration never before seen at Harker. A handful of student directors are assisting Draper and rehearsing an alternate cast. A whole host of students are composing new music and choreographing new routines. There are more hands on deck and more moving parts than ever before, all to create a play that is not only epic but also searingly contemporary. Here are a few of the innovations taking center stage at Harker this fall:
A NEW CONFIGURATION
“Metamorphoses”featured a pool. “A Christmas Carol”had a live pre-show Dickens Faire. “Anon(ymous)” will split its audience into two and face them against each other across the stage, like fans on two sides of a football field, in a configuration known in the theater world as tennis court-style.
“I always like to mix it up,” says Draper. Because Harker lacks a theater, the performing arts directors flex their creativity every year, reinventing the Blackford auditorium when they can. Until Harker has a real performance space, he says, “I’m going to keep taking advantage of it.”
Draper named The National Theatre of Scotland’s “Black Watch” and Cirque du Soleil’s “Corteo”as his influences for the new design. In “Black Watch,” which toured the world before finally reaching San Francisco in May of this year, a partitioned audience watched a dozen soldiers race up and down a central runway connecting two structures resembling army bases at either end, acting out the Iraq War and their lives afterward. In “Corteo,” the audience wrapped circularly around a central disk, with exits and entrances also proceeding from two opposing poles. Both productions created immersive experiences that Draper was keen to emulate.
The year’s new setup is filled with exciting challenges for the actors, who now face an audience on all sides. “It makes you act three-sixty,” says Draper. “There’s no hiding,” shared one student at the cast’s retreat this month. “You feel like you always have eyes on you.” Draper, for his part, has enjoyed the new challenge. “We’re learning a lot,” he says. “It’s very different.”
A PIECE OF THE ZEITGEIST
“Anon(ymous)‘” treatment of contemporary material is startlingly new to Harker’s drama wing of the Conservatory; for a program that has made its name on classics like last year’s “Hamlet,” a freshly-written epic ripped from the headlines is a bold departure. When the actors were asked at their retreat whether this was the first time any of them had ever embarked on a project this much in the zeitgeist, the team responded with an almost-choral “yes.” “It’s not anything in the past,” one student chimed in. “It’s happening now. It’s part of our job to make people aware.”
On how they found their research for the play, the students were clear: rather than head to the library and search the catalog for critical essays as they might with a classic, they took to Google News and YouTube to develop deeper understandings of the predicaments and lifestyles of their characters.
For Draper, it was critical that the students examine their own lives and ancestries as well. So the director asked his actors to research their own lineages. He also gave each student a piece of foam core, and asked them to place information about what they uncovered on one side and their family trees on the other. That art, accompanied by the students’ personal stories, will hang in the lobby when the audience comes to view “Anon(ymous).”
The actors looked into their family histories with immigration and political and personal turmoil. One, whose character in “Anon(ymous)” must be the “man of the family,” told of an ancestor whose father was felled by an earthquake in Japan, leaving him to become that “man of the family.” Another told of a divide in the older generations of his family over allegiances with British prior to the partition of India. Those stories became a pretext to learn about the refugee camps spurred on by the political turmoil.
The exercise succeeded in casting the play as a piece of very personal reality for the actors, allowing them to see their characters in the context of their own lives. One student confessed that his heart was not in the play until he sought out his family and heard tales of their past. That made the play personal for him. “The play is resonating with students as I’d hoped it would,” says Draper.
Indeed, that “Anon(ymous)”is a tale of a diaspora journey was one more reason Draper chose the play for Harker. “It’s about home. It’s about immigration. It’s about leaving one place and going to another,” he says. “I think a lot of Harker families, within a generation or two, have left home and made a new home in Silicon Valley, in California, in the U.S.A.”
ULTRA-THEATRICAL
In many ways, “Anon(ymous)” is more than just a play, it’s a multidisciplinary theater event. In one love scene, two characters tread water in a sea of fabric. In another moment, moving hoops cascade down the runway to conjure up images of the characters dashing through tunnels. A shadow dance, in the style of Balinese wayang kulit shadow puppetry, tells the story of Anon and his mother.
The characters are outsized as well. “It’s not naturalistic or realistic,” says Draper. “One of the characters from “The Odyssey,” the cyclops, is, in this story, a demented butcher who eats people. He’s trying to kill our protagonist with a big butcher knife.”
“Anon(ymous)”is larger than life, in order to take the audience on a journey that is ripped from real life and even their own lives. With the actors being stretched in so many new ways, and with so many taking on extra responsibilities like choreography and puppeteering, it’s been a made dash to the finish, and an incredibly rewarding one for the collaborators. “You never know what’s going to happen next,” one student says. Another chimes in, “none of us knows exactly what we’re doing, but we know it’s going to be amazing.”
“Anon(ymous),” by Naomi Iizuka, plays Thurs., Oct. 31 through Sat., Nov. 2 at the Blackford Theater.
After opening the Peninsula home-to-school route during the 2012-13 school year, Harker has further expanded its bus services for families in need of more transportation options.
The new Silver Creek route consists of two buses servicing the Silver Creek area. The middle and upper school bus first arrives at the Union Ave. preschool campus to connect to the intracampus shuttle, which then takes students to the middle and upper schools. Lower school students take a separate bus to the preschool, which then takes them to the lower school.
“The Bucknall parents, obviously, are thrilled about that, because their kids get to stay on the bus and go straight to campus which is what they’ve always wanted,” said Greg Lawson, assistant head of school for student affairs.
Continuing from last year, the Peninsula route makes stops at the middle and lower school campuses, with connections to the preschool and upper school campuses via the intracampus shuttle. “We really try to make sure we have a path for every child to get to every place,” Lawson said.
Additionally, the Union campus now serves as a hub for the intracampus shuttle, which allows families a way to transport students to Harker’s other three campuses via the preschool. “The opening of Union as a hub on the intracampus shuttle has actually served some of those Almaden families who are now dropping off kids there,” Lawson said.
The new routes make student transportation more convenient for Harker families whose parents live or work in areas that are out of the way. It also helps reduce traffic in the area around Harker’s campuses, lightening the traffic burden on the families who commute by car. Lawson estimated that between 70 and 80 students ride buses to school. “Maybe that’s 50 cars that don’t have to come to campus,” he said, factoring in the possibility of several families containing siblings. “Then if you add the folks that are using the intracampus shuttle, it’s reducing some more.”
This year, Harker also assumed management of the Fremont route, which had previously been run for years by a consortium of Harker parents. It stops at the lower, middle and upper school campuses and is also the only route that offers school-to-home service because of the complex nature of Harker’s afternoon schedule. Consideration may be given to opening additional school-to-home routes when there is more demand.
Harker may also look into adding more home-to-school routes if demand for them increases. “The fun part of getting started last year was that we had other people start chomping at the bit,” said Lawson. “We’re amenable to any area that can sustain it. We do it as a service, but we’ve got to be fiscally responsible.”
Already in the 2013-14 school year, Harker records are being shattered. For the second straight week, Harker’s girls golf team posted the top score in Harker history. Over at cross country, a freshman runner set a new school record by 50 full seconds. Varsity football stomped Livermore Valley in a blowout, while varsity tennis came away from the Los Altos Tournament with a silver division championship and all three water polo teams swept Cupertino. These are the scores and updates for Harker athletics from a busy second week of October:
Golf:
GIRLS GOLF CONTINUES TO ROLL
Two weeks ago, the girls golf team shot a school record in a 199-211 loss to Sacred Heart Prep at Los Lagos. This past week, they did one better, shooting a 210 to set a new record and defeat Notre Dame San Jose by the score of 210-255.
In the match, senior Kristine Lin earned her eighth straight medalist honors, shooting a 2 over par 36. On the fourth hole of the game, a 236-yard par 4, Lin drove the green and then two-putted for a birdie.
In driving the team to its best overall score in history, a number of Harker athletes also reached personal bests. Daphne Liang, grade 10, tied her career best with a 5 over par 39, while fellow sophomore Ashley Zhong did the same with a 7 over par 41. Connie Li, a senior also tied her personal best, shooting a 12 over par 46.
The girls’ work is winning high praises from their leadership. “This is by far the most hard-working and most improved team I have ever coached,” writes coach Ie-Chen Cheng. “Literally, each team member shot her personal best scores in the past weeks.”
The Eagles travel next to face Menlo today and then return home to host Castilleja on Tuesday at Los Lagos. Tuesday will be their senior night. The celebration will cap off a stellar season of record-setting results and personal growth. “The time they put in over the summer and in the past couple of months [is] paying great dividends,” notes Cheng. “We are so proud of what we have accomplished so far.”
After their new victories over Mercy-Burlingame and Notre Dame, the girls are now in sole possession of third place in the league with a 5-3 record. Come support the team on their senior day this Tuesday at Los Lagos Golf Course!
HARKER ALUM PLAYS FOR STANFORD
Maverick McNealy ’13 has made the traveling squad at Stanford golf. With the team, “Mav” traveled to play a tournament at Erin Hills in Wisconsin, the site of the 2017 U.S. Open, and came in 25th place as Stanford secured a victory. All told, Stanford shot a 13 under 851, defeating runner-up UCLA by eight strokes and besting third-place SMU and Oklahoma by a dozen. Fourteen teams in total competed in the tournament. McNealy shot a 72 in the first round, a 75 in the second, and a 73 in the third. His first-round 72 went for par. Stanford plays again on Oct. 18-20, this time at the Golf Club of Georgia in Alpharetta, Ga.
Cross Country:
“TRULY ELITE LEVEL”
Niki Iyer is a freshman. She just won the varsity girls individual race title at the Crystal Springs Invitational this past Saturday.
“This is truly elite level,” wrote Dan Molin, Harker’s athletic director in an email announcing Iyer’s accomplishment to the school.
Iyer never trailed in the race, leaping out ahead of the pack and leading wire-to-wire. Her time set a new school record by 50 full seconds. That time was the fifth fastest of all CCS runners this year, and the 10-best ever for a freshman in the course’s 70 years of existence.
Junior Corey Gonzales had a great week as well, running in the championship varsity boys race and placing eighth against the top runners in all of California.
Both Gonzales and Iyer will run this Thursday at the Baylands Park cross country course. They will be looking for their second win in a row over WBAL league runners.
Football:
TRIPLE THREAT LEADS HARKER TO BLOWOUT WIN
Senior Kevin Moss led the Eagles on offense, defense and special teams in a blowout 58-16 victory against the Livermore Valley Preparatory Hawks. Moss ran for two touchdowns on offense, returned an interception for a touchdown, led the team with three solo sacks, and ran a kickoff back for his fourth touchdown of the game. Quarterback Keanu Forbes, grade 11, had a huge game as well, throwing two touchdown passes to wide receiver Sid Krishnamurthi, grade 11, and one to sophomore running back Jonathan Keller. Forbes ran for a touchdown as well on a 36-yard sprint in the fourth quarter. All told, Harker recorded 387 yards of total offense on 42 plays from scrimmage while a stingy and ferocious defense held the opposing Hawks to just 180 yards on 39 plays. While both teams were able to move the ball, Harker’s defense had Livermore Valley moving in both directions, sending them backwards on eight – count ‘em, eight – timely quarterback sacks. Harker kicker Alyssa Amick, grade 11, added six extra points after touchdowns. The junior varsity squad has the next game on the schedule, taking on Lynbrook this Friday.
Volleyball:
VARSITY CAPS BUSY WEEK WITH TOURNAMENT WIN
The varsity girls volleyball team had a busy week, defeating Woodside Priory in straight sets, losing to number 2-ranked Menlo, and then going 3-1 at the Los Altos Tournament to earn the silver division championship. Varsity’s record now stands at 9-6 overall and an even 2-2 in league going into tonight’s home matchup against Presentation. The junior varsity team, meanwhile, owns an exceptional 16-5 record and, after victories against Priory and Menlo this week, is looking strong in league play.
Water Polo:
THREE TEAMS SCORE VICTORIES AGAINST CUPERTINO
Three of Harker’s water polo teams faced off against Cupertino last Tuesday, and all three came away with big victories. The boys varsity team won 12-5. The boys junior varsity team won 8-4. And, the girls varsity team won 9-5. This Tuesday, the teams play again, with the boys hosting Saratoga and the girls hosting Mountain View. On Thursday, both teams will host Fremont at the Singh Aquatic Center.
Tennis:
AFTER 1-1 WEEK, GIRLS TENNIS STANDS AT 6-3 OVERALL
The girls tennis team crushed Crystal Springs by a margin of 6-1 last Tuesday, then lost a heartbreaking game to Castilleja, dropping their record to a still-sterling 6-3 overall. The girls will attempt to rebound against Notre Dame and Sacred Heart this week.
Coming Up This Week:
This Monday, the girls golf team heads to the Palo Alto Municipal Golf Course to face off against the Menlo School in a league match, beginning at 3 p.m. Over at Blackford, the junior varsity girls volleyball team will take on Presentation High School at 4:30 p.m., followed by the varsity girls’ game against Presentation at 5:45 p.m.
On Tuesday, the varsity girls tennis team will head to the Decathlon Club in Santa Clara for a league home game against Notre Dame High School – San Jose. At Los Lagos Golf Course in San Jose, the girls golf team will play a “home” game of their own against Castilleja. The freshman girls volleyball team will take on Milpitas High School at Harker’s Saratoga campus at 4:15 p.m. Just 15 minutes later on that same campus, the varsity boys water polo team will face off against Saratoga High School in a league game. The JV boys water polo team will follow them at 5:45 p.m. with a game of their own against Saratoga. Out in Mountain View, the varsity girls water polo team plays Mountain View High School at 6:45 p.m.
All of Harker’s athletic teams are off on Wednesday. Then, on Thursday, varsity cross country travels to Baylands Park in Sunnyvale for a WBAL league meet, beginning at 3 p.m. At 3:30 p.m, the varsity girls tennis team starts a match at Sacred Heart Preparatory School in Atherton. Back on Harker’s Saratoga campus, the varsity girls water polo team plays Fremont High School at 4:30 p.m. The junior varsity boys water polo team will follow that up with a game of their own against Fremont High School at 5:45 p.m, to be followed by the varsity boys water polo team’s night game at 6:45 p.m. Up in San Francisco, the junior varsity girls volleyball team will take on Mercy High School at 4:30 p.m, followed by the varsity girls volleyball game at 5:45 p.m.
Friday sees just one Harker athletic event: The junior varsity football team takes on Lynbrook High School in an away game at 5 p.m.
Harker staff writer Zach Jones contributed to this story.
A beautiful fall day provided the perfect backdrop for the 2013 Harker Harvest Festival, the school’s 63rd annual Family & Alumni Picnic.
As in previous years, the event was held on the middle school campus, but faithful picnic-goers surely noticed the fresh and fun changes to this family-oriented day. The multipurpose room held extravagant silent auction packages, offering art, outings with teachers, gift baskets and more. The cafetorium was kept wide open for laser tag, and lower school children were spotted ducking behind blinds scattered through the room as they tried to catch each other with light beams.
The blacktop was, as always, the site of carnival game booths. Here families tried their luck at skill games, trying to knock down, hit, fill, pop or ring objects for prize tickets. The Pig Pong Toss was a wall of cute painted piggies with actual boxes for noses, which kids tried to fill with Ping-Pong balls. At another popular booth kids threw paint on Frisbees as they spun around, resulting in fun and swirly souvenirs.
Around the edges of the blacktop were many fun activities to tempt kids of all ages. A petting zoo with goats and ducks, pony rides, bounce slides, a dunk tank and more all gathered crowds; and, new this year, old-fashioned tricycle and sack races kept both kids and adults giggling. Katie Florio, kindergarten teacher, was enjoying the trike races: “It’s great to see all the kids out having fun with their families and getting to play with all their teachers.”
As Florio alluded to, the structure of the day was changed to allow teachers more time to hang out with their students, and intense games of foosball, Ping-Pong and basketball throws were played out in the gym. Lower school math teacher Diane Plauck laughed, “I started my day having a Ping-Pong match with one of [my students]. He beat me, but still it was fun.”
“It’s probably really great for the lower school and middle school kids to have a chance to play Ping-Pong or foosball with teachers and stuff like that, to really change up the dynamic of how they interact with one another,” said upper school science teacher Gary Blickenstaff.
Aside from the opportunity to bond with their teachers, students also enjoyed meeting up with their friends in a welcoming and fun environment. “I like that most of my friends come here and we just have fun. It’s basically a huge carnival,” said student volunteer Calvin Kocienda, grade 10, who worked the laser tag area with his friends in the robotics club.
Classmate Alyssa Crawford liked that the Harvest Festival “brings all the different grades together.”
Parent volunteers also had a big impact on the event’s success, running game booths, selling tickets and serving food to the hundreds of attendees. “I just think it’s a great opportunity to help the children and help the school,” said parent Tracy Baeckler (Alexandra, grade 5), who has volunteered since her daughter was a kindergartner.
Themed around a fictional Harker Thanksgiving Parade, the student show was a huge hit, highlighting dozens of kids from nine performing arts troupes. Mallika Vashist, grade 6, who performed with the choir group Dynamics, enjoyed that Harvest Festival offered her the chance to perform in front of a large audience. “Performing in front of a bunch of people is really fun for me,” she said.
Making cameos were Jennifer Gargano, assistant head of school for academic affairs, as Cookie Monster, Head of School Chris Nikoloff as a giant turkey, and Butch Keller, upper school head, as a big SpongeBob SquarePants “float.” Other administrators as well as the IT and facility departments also walked the stage in the “parade,” to a warm and appreciative round of applause from spectators.
Alumni gathered at their shady grove to reunite and chat, and they had new neighbors this year: the preschool was a welcome presence at this long Harker tradition, with teachers and the newest Eagles having fun in a pumpkin patch. Preschool teacher Tanya Burrell, enjoying her first family picnic, said that not only was it “exciting to see [the preschoolers] outside of the school setting, we’re seeing them explore some of the other booths. It’s nice that they’re part of the larger Harker community.”
Indeed, this event truly captured the community spirit that is so much a part of Harker.
This story originally appeared in the fall 2013 Harker Quarterly.
For more than a decade, Harker’s summer tech grant program has enabled Harker teachers to find new and exciting ways to enhance and diversify the ways they teach, whether it be creating engaging presentations, providing students with access to more learning resources or simply finding better ways to organize homework and in-class assignments.
Lower school English teacher Katie Molin decided to acclimate herself more to some of the Chromebook applications that her students will be using during the year. “As an English teacher, I’m always interested in ways to make the teaching of essay writing easier, the grading of essays more efficient, and the feedback more meaningful,” she said.
To accomplish this, she learned how to use Google Docs as a way for students to submit their work. “Google Docs will allow me to give the students more detailed feedback on their writing. It will be easier for them to edit their work, and I will know when they think they have ‘fixed’ the problem,” she said. “Their work will be stored and accessible now in a way it wasn’t before.”
Molin’s students will also use Blogger, another Google product, to post responses to short stories. She also plans to use her own blog to inform parents about their students’ classwork.
In order to show lower and middle school English teachers how to use Membean, a new online vocabulary program, English teacher Patricia Lai Burrows created tools that explained how the program works and how to show students to use it. “I created videos using Google Hangout on Air to navigate through the Membean teacher dashboard, understand the class statistics and create quizzes,” she said. “As part of this process, I learned how to create YouTube channels to house all my videos, and also to include Google Effects to enhance and add some humor to the presentations.”
Burrows said her training tools would help ease the burden on teachers as they prepared for another school year. “I know how daunting it is for a teacher to have to learn a new tool while prepping for the coming year and adjusting to all the other changes that naturally occur in a new year,” she said. “I wanted to create resources that would manage teacher stress associated with learning a completely new program like this one.”
She further added that the tech grant program is a great opportunity for faculty to learn skills that will benefit both themselves and their students. “I am grateful that the school encourages this kind of professional development, and it appears to me to be a win-win situation,” she said.
Building on their tech grant project from last year, upper school librarian Meredith Cranston and history teacher Julie Wheeler created an online area where AP Government students can create websites devoted to a topic they will be focusing on during the school year.
“We liked the political discussions they were having on the blog, but we wanted them to get more into media analysis, looking at where they were getting their political news, what perspectives these news sources might have, and just thinking a little more critically about media messages in general,” Cranston said.
This story originally appeared in the fall 2013 Harker Quarterly.
On June 7, Harker hosted its ninth annual Teacher Institute, inviting teachers from schools all over the Bay Area to attend a wide variety of workshops intended to improve their teaching methods and their understanding of instructional technologies.
The event was organized by Harker’s instructional technology department and sponsored by Silicon Valley Computer-Using Educators (SVCUE). Each of the Teacher Institute’s three sessions consisted of a number of classes that visiting teachers were free to attend. “There were so many things we are going to take back to our school,” said Julia Maynard, a language arts and social studies teacher at Parkside Middle School in San Bruno. “I have been to several tech conferences, and this was by far the most beneficial!”
This story originally appeared in the fall 2013 Harker Quarterly.
Upper school registrar Derek Kameda was invited to present at the Advanced Placement Summer Institute for Administrators in June in Jacksonville, Fla. There, he gave presentations on how to improve testing performance and AP score reports. Kameda has previously lent his skills as an AP coordinator consultant to test coordinators so that they might more effectively administer AP exams.
At the National Junior Classical League Convention held at the University of Nevada – Las Vegas this July, upper school Latin teacher John Hawley received a silver bowl for attending 20 NJCL conventions. The bowl was presented by Harker alumni and former JCLers Richard Kwant ‘07 and Ruchi Srivastava ’08, who gave moving speeches about Hawley’s influence as their teacher and JCL sponsor.
In July, middle school science teacher Daniel Sommer went on a professional development trip to Hawaii’s Big Island for a five-day field course, Geosciences of the Big Island. “Fantastic class!” he noted.
The expedition, including exploration of the island’s geologic wonders, is designed especially for educators. In a range of activities, class members climbed the famous Kilauea volcano to view the summit caldera and lava flows and to the summit of Mauna Kea (the highest volcanic mountain in Hawaii) to view glacial deposits, and explored Hawaiian reef formations by snorkel.
Middle school history teacher Jonathan Brusco spent part of his summer attending a three-day, invitation-only conference at Stanford University. The event, sponsored by SPICE, an international studies program at Stanford, and the Hana Financial Group, a Korean investment company, was about incorporating Korean history into school curriculum.
“The conference was extremely beneficial and featured guest speakers and curriculum ideas,” recalled Brusco, adding that it vastly expanded his knowledge of both Korean history and culture. He said he plans to utilize many of the things he learned during the conference with his Harker students this year.
In other news, Brusco serves on the board of trustees at Gavilan College in Gilroy and recently started a new subcommittee that is going to include board members of all the college’s feeder high school districts.
“We will be tackling student success at the college with the hope that we can lower remediation rates and thus be able to offer more career-oriented programs to our students and better serve the district as a whole,” said Brusco, who was recently featured in an article about this subject in the Morgan Hill Times.
Sue Smith, library director, and Lauri Vaughan, upper school librarian, contributed an article to the journal of the California School Library Association. In the article, they detail how they have used LibGuides software to promote information literacy among students and how they have worked with teachers to provide quality resources for student research.
At press time, Harker Quarterly learned that “Growing Schools: Librarians as Professional Developers,” a book Smith had previously contributed a chapter to, has just been added to the recommended reading list of the U.S. Department of Education.
Abigail Joseph, middle school computer science teacher, ran a one- week Mobile App Entrepreneurship Camp in Oakland under the auspices of Black Girls Code, an organization dedicated to providing young and pre-teen girls of color opportunities to learn in-demand skills in technology and computer programming at a time when they are naturally thinking about what they want to be when they grow up.
“The camp focused on mobile app creation from concept to development,” said Joseph. “Students learned to use MIT App Inventor and were able test the app out on mobile phones. The camp ended with a field trip to the Facebook campus, where students pulled together their final app prototypes and a business plan for their ideas with Facebook employees. Of course the highlight was getting to meet Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.”
Her group was 21 girls strong and Joseph noted, “The most rewarding part was seeing the girls leave the camp with a desire to learn more and continue working on their projects on their own.”
Joseph has been involved with opening technology up to girls for some time. “I have been actively involved in Black Girls Code since the spring of this year,” she said. “In addition to the summer camp, I have been the technical lead for a build-a-webpage-in-a-day workshop in the Mission in San Francisco.”
Now successful in the technology field, Joseph is committed to giving back. “As a child, I benefited from a similar program that sparked my interest in computer science, and kept me in the pipeline to pursue it and get my Ph.D. It has always been my dream to create or be a part of a program that provides the same opportunities for young people of color to know that they have choices when choosing careers, and that computer science and engineering can be among them. I am happy to provide young girls of color opportunities and paths to walk in my footsteps and the footsteps of other black female computer scientists.”
The cross country season is starting up again, which means that Corey Gonzales, grade 11, is right back where he left off last year, setting new school records. His mark in the junior boys race at Toro Park beat his own mark at the CCS finals last year, a time that sent him to the state meet.
Tennis
In their first game of the new season, the girls won 5-2 over Santa Catalina, losing on four of the seven courts before coming back to win five second sets and the only third set tiebreaker. Dora Tzeng, grade 12, Isabelle Gross, grade 10, and Arden Hu, grade 11, all won singles matches and the teams of sophomores Stephanie Huang and Nadia Palte as well as Meghana Appalaraju, grade 11, and Era Iyer, grade 9, won doubles matches. Gross’ singles match was the high- light thriller: she lost the first set 1-6 in a blowout, but came back to win the second set before finally pulling out a dead-even third set 12-10.
Football
In the opening game, Harker varsity football blew out the Faith Christian Warriors 41-0 in Coalinga. Defense back Samir Chaudhry, grade 12, had two pivotal interceptions in the shut- out. Running back Kevin Moss, grade 12, ran for two touchdowns and kicker Alyssa Amick, grade 11, racked up 11 points. Chaudhry, Adarsh Battu, grade 12, and Sid Krishnamurthi, grade 11, also scored touchdowns.
GirlsVolleyball
Both girls junior varsity and varsity teams won their season openers against the West Catholic League’s Notre Dame-Belmont in straight games. For the varsity, Shannon Richardson, grade 10, had 12 kills; Divya Kalidindi, grade 12, had 11; and Shreya Dixit, grade 11, had 10.
Water Polo
Juniors Billy Bloomquist and Eric Holt racked up seven goals apiece in early play at the Wilcox Tournament, where Harker’s varsity team defeated league rival Santa Clara on their way to a 1-2 tournament. JV also went 1-2 at the San Benito Tournament in early September.
Summer Sports
Summer’s ending, and that means athletes will be leaping into the fall season soon! But even during the time away from school, Harker’s sportsmen and sportswomen have been training, winning and earning honors. Harker has individual students snatching
up medals, teams being recognized for academic achievement, coaches winning awards, and alumni joining university teams. To the update!
Basketball
Harker athletes competed in and won the Varsity Summer League at Evergreen Valley High School. The team finished the regular season of the summer league second in their division, losing only one game to a team that finished with an undefeated record. In the playoffs, Harker defeated the third-seated team in the other division, moving on to face an undefeated team from the other division at Evergreen, beating them by six points after taking the lead in the final minutes. That pushed Harker into the championship game, where Harker won by a large margin.
The summer league represents an opportunity for players to work on individual skills but grow as a team, as well as for rising players to step up and prove themselves going into the following year.
Soccer
A hearty congratulations is in order for the boys soccer team, who posted the highest GPA of any high school male soccer team in California. This August, the California Interscholastic Federation, which was founded nearly a century ago in 1914, announced its 2012-13 state academic team champions, an honor bestowed upon teams with the highest overall grade point average in each sport.
For the victory, the California Interscholastic Federation will bestow upon Harker a banner, which Harker can display in a gym or other prominent space. Boys soccer finished their 2013 season with a 7-8-2 record overall and a 5-7-2 record in league play, landing them with a fourth-place overall finish.
While Harker’s athletes were being re- warded for their academic achievement, varsity coach Shaun Tsakiris gained some recognition as well. In July, U.S. Soccer’s Development Academy voted Tsakiris national coach of the year.
In alumni news, Siobhan Cox ’13 has already started playing for Stanford! So far, she’s started two out of three games and has an assist. Stanford is off to a 2-0-1 start.
Football
Indraneel “Neel” Salukhe ’12 will be playing football for the University of Washington in Seattle this year. Salukhe played football all four years at Harker. A wide receiver, he walked on for spring football last season and was invited to join the regular football camp to train with and play for U.W.
This story originally appeared in the fall 2013 Harker Quarterly. Harker’s ongoing commitment to improving its environmental standards has led to the formation of the Green Committee, a group of faculty and staff working to formulate and execute a strategy toward making Harker a greener school both practically and culturally.
“The committee’s a way to … get people together to share ideas in terms of projects we want to do and how to carry out those projects,” said Jeff Sutton, the upper school science teacher who leads the committee along with fellow science teacher Kate Schafer.
The people who would eventually form the committee, which is made up of people from all of Harker’s divisions, first met in late 2012 to discuss a long-term plan for furthering Harker’s green efforts. The committee came up with seven areas in which Harker could improve: energy conservation, waste reduction, reducing the use of toxic chemicals, instituting more shuttles and encouraging carpooling to reduce pollution, improving water quality, creating greener schoolyards and improving student food choices in order to offer more healthy foods.
Prior to the forming of the committee, there were initiatives in place across Harker’s three campuses. “We wanted to bring all those initiatives together and really collect and collate our ideas and our efforts and make them unified across pre-K through 12,” said Chris Nikoloff, head of school. “It was really more of a way of honoring a lot of good work and just trying to bring it all together to take it to the next level.”
The committee is currently working to establish a baseline that will offer them a better picture of what needs to be done going forward, with a focus on energy usage and waste reduction. “One of the things that we have realized that we need to do is get more details than we did in our initial research,” said Schafer. “One of things that we’re going to be working on, with the help of other Green Committee members, is conducting some of those audits.”
In the coming year, the committee hopes to conduct an audit of all the waste that is created on the three K-12 campuses over a period of 24 hours and determine 1) how much of it could have avoided being sent to a landfill; 2) how much could have been recycled or composted; and 3) what portion did not need to be created at all. One future goal is to purchase an industrial composter and start a pilot composting program at the upper school. This would allow the campus to reduce all biodegradable food waste, including all paper cups and paper products, and quickly break them down into compost instead of discarding them as landfill fodder. At a meeting in January, the committee decided to launch an energy reduction campaign in the spring of 2013 to encourage stu- dents, faculty and staff to turn off lights and close laptops in order to reduce energy usage across all campuses. According to Sutton, the campaign yielded “mixed results,” as the energy bills from those months were roughly the same as previous months. “From our little experiment, it’s not people having their laptops plugged in so much,” said Sutton. “I’m sure that makes a difference, but there’s something bigger, like an air conditioner or a refrigerant or a heater that’s causing the draw.” The committee is looking into software that will assist in discovering where Harker has opportunities to become more energy efficient. Some progress has already been made in the form of lighting upgrades at the upper school and preschool campuses. “Over the course of the summer and into the coming year, all four of our campuses will have gone through a lighting energy efficiency audit by an independent PG&E vendor,” said Mike Bassoni, the school’s facility manager. “Through grant monies made available by PG&E, we have to date received more than $40,000 in energy-efficient lighting upgrades.”
Similar upgrades are also in store for the middle and lower school campuses, pending review. The upgrades to the upper school and preschool campuses alone are expected to save the school more than $33,000 a year in energy costs. Another crucial part of the Green Committee’s plans is to get student buy-in and involvement for the initiatives. “Once we figure out as a committee what our goals are, then I’m going to be the one that goes to the kids and says, ‘OK, we want to realize some goals, would you like to join us?’” said Diana Moss, upper school Spanish teacher and dean of the Class of 2015. Moss is being joined by upper school math teacher and Class of 2014 dean Victor Adler in this effort. Representatives from other campuses, including middle school math teacher Margaret Huntley, middle school history teacher Andy Keller, lower school math and science teacher Enni Chen and lower school art teacher Gerry-louise Robinson, all plan to get students on their respective campuses involved. During the spring 2013 semester, new water fountains were installed at the upper school that dispense filtered water and have replaced traditional bottled water dispensers. These are also part of an ongoing effort to reduce paper waste by encouraging students and staff to bring water bottles to use instead of paper cups, which will supplement other waste reduction efforts such as paper recycling and cell phone and battery drop-off stations. Faculty and staff are also being encouraged to get into the habit of bringing coffee mugs to work. In addition, a new student group called Brilliant Organizers of Students Sustainability (BOSS) has been formed and will be working with the Green Committee on student-led sustainability projects.
Over the summer, Moss had the opportunity to research how students at other schools participated in their schools’ green efforts. “They’re doing some amazing things. Kids are fired up and they’re actually leading these initiatives,” she said. Part of her plan to increase student involvement is to have them network and share ideas with students at other schools. “Eventually I see the Green Committee as being a mixed group of student leaders and faculty and staff who are also interested in sustainability,” she said. The committee hopes that one day Harker can be certified as both a California Green Business and a Green Ribbon school. To do so will require fulfilling requirements set by both programs. “Schools are particularly challenging because they do so many different things,” Schafer said. “We have pools, we have food service, we have all of these different components. We’re almost a like a little mini-city in and of ourselves.” Even though their goals may be lofty, Sutton said that having “big goals” can offer a point of inspiration necessary to motivate the Harker community into making a big push to make the school more environmentally responsible. “That’s one of our major goals going forward, too: to make this Green Committee not a committee but an ideology, where it lives beyond the life of the people who are here now.”
This story originally appeared in the fall 2013 Harker Quarterly.
Harker’s ever-evolving food services program is set to undergo more exciting changes in the coming year, with more menu options, healthier food choices and more themed varieties. Patrons may have
already noticed some of the many changes food service manager Stephen Martin – or “Chef Steve,” as he has come to be known in his nearly 25 years at Harker – has made in the last two years.
“We’re trying to stay on the cutting edge and add new things, healthy choices,” said Martin. “We use a lot less mayonnaise now. We don’t use a lot of mayonnaise-based dressings and when we make salads we use a lot of extra virgin olive oil and vinegars.”
Dessert portions were also made smaller overall, but not to discourage people from partaking of cake or brownies after lunch. “A taste can go a long way,” Martin said. In other words, a smaller portion can satisfy the hunger for confections without making patrons feel too guilty about grabbing something sweet. This enables dieters to enjoy smaller desserts while others can have more if they so choose. “By cutting [desserts] smaller,” Martin said, “we were able to give people more variety.”
New to the upper school this year is the addition of an area dedicated to international foods, where cuisine from different parts of the world will be featured on a regular basis. “We may do Asian for two weeks, we may do German, we may do French,” Martin said. A new station featuring Mexican dishes and a salsa bar has also been added at the gym.
Several new stations have been added to offer a greater diversity of dishes and to make upper school lunchtime crowds more manageable. Among these are the outdoor barbecue station, the sidewalk café (where to-go wraps and other items are served via cart) and a window in the Bistro serving sushi, quiches and other appetizers.
“We needed more stations because so many students were forced into an area,” said Martin. “We really were trying to spread out the crowd. That’s why we added a window in the Bistro.”
At the middle school, where a bistro and barbecue station have also been added, there will be an increased emphasis on vegetarian options in response to increased demand from middle school families. “We designated a whole section of the station to vegetarian choices,” Martin noted.
Changes are also in store for the lower school, where Martin hopes to educate children on foods featuring whole grains and whole wheat. “They can’t be intimidated by food,” he said. “So we’re going to try to … educate the little ones on eating certain things that make it so that the menu is very healthy but appealing.”
In order to make the food more “exciting” for the entire Harker community as well as its younger students, Martin plans to feature a type of fruit each month: “We’ll do different salads, incorporate it into the entrée, incorporate it into desserts, just to get kids to try to eat more fruit.”
The lower, middle and upper schools are not the only places where Martin has big plans, however. The newly launched preschool will also focus on providing healthy foods that students will enjoy, such as mini whole-grain bagel sandwiches, whole-wheat English muffin pizzas and items featuring chicken and turkey. In an effort to “try to keep it low in fat and high in nutritional value,” as Martin put it, no fried food will be served.
“A lot of stuff is going to be from scratch,” added preschool kitchen manager Lisa Machuca.
Machuca also noted that food at the preschool will be served differently than at other campuses. Instead of eating at a designated lunch area, preschool students will have food brought to them in their classrooms and the students will serve themselves.
Students will also be served snacks three times a day, including fruit smoothies, cottage cheese, apple slices and other health-minded and age-appropriate foods.
Schoolwide gluten-free options are also being considered, but Martin and the food service department want to make sure that they can meet their own high standards when offering these options. “We’re trying to work with gluten-free, but it’s unfortunate that gluten’s in almost everything,” Martin said, also noting that gluten-free bread tends to fall apart easily. “We’re going to start simple, but we’re going to try to get the best of the best and then we’re going to feature it.”
Aside from finding ways to keep food options interesting for the Harker community, Martin is also passionate about informing the community about what they eat and his philosophy on keeping Harker students, faculty and staff healthy and fulfilled. “I really want to establish a rapport with the whole community, with the teachers and the staff and the kids, about a balanced diet,” he said. To this end, he hopes to publish nutritional information in the Harker online portals that will provide the community with information about what they eat and “give them the tools to work with so they can have a healthy diet.”
By doing this, he hopes that some misconceptions people have about the food they eat can be quelled. “It’s not bad to eat pizza. It’s bad to eat pizza every day.” In the end, Martin said, food service’s mission is to offer a wide variety of choices to the Harker community that will allow them to make the choices they need for a proper diet. “You can go to every station and get a well-balanced meal,” he said.