The 60th Harker Family and Alumni Picnic, titled Peace Love Picnic, danced through a warm afternoon, the sound of Harker choirs and bands blending with the chatter of young and old enjoying a perfect end-of-summer day on the ’60s-themed Blackford campus.
The picnic featured a special “Birthday Boulevard” to celebrate the anniversary of former school president Howard Nichols’ birthday and, for the first time, the lower school choir and combination lower and middle school jazz band took to the stage to entertain picnickers. All three campuses’ performing arts groups, along with a magician and storyteller, kept the stage hopping the whole day.
Mary Hyver (Ben, grade 5; Emma, grade 3), a new family to Harker, was strolling the blacktop with husband, Scott, and two smaller children enjoying the picnic for the first time. “There is plenty to do for the kids,” she said. The family was anticipating watching Ben perform with the lower and middle school jazz band later.
Middle schoolers were there to see and be seen. Selin Ekici, grade 7, has been attending Harker since grade 3 and attends picnics regularly. “It has just always been really fun,” she said, “I’m mainly here to see everybody.”
Ekici was accompanied by classmate Chloe van den Dries, who said she was there to “play the games and eat food. I just like to come and walk, to watch the crowds.”
Plenty of upper school students were evident. Sean Knudsen, grade 9, at the picnic to perform with Bel Canto, and wearing his football jersey (varsity won Friday night, bringing their record to 6-0) was wandering the picnic area with a friend, just checking things out.
“I’m here to support my cousin,” said Apurva Gorti, grade 9. “He’s singing.” Otherwise, she said, “I’m just here to be with my friends, just hang. My brother is over there, and he’s in kindergarten, so he came for all the games and rides and he’s having a really good time.”
As an alum and now a mom, Preete Bhanot ’88, attending with her two children (Keshav, grade 2; Priya grade 4) has a few picnics behind her. “I love it!” she said of the picnic. “I have been bringing (the children) since Priya was in kindergarten – we come every year. This year, with her children on stage in the choir, “we ate and we watched their performance, which was really cool – this was the first time they have performed in it.”
Priya said she loves winning prizes, but her favorite activity is dunking the teachers at the dunk tank. Keshav said he was there for the rock climbing.
The stage was never empty for long and at 3:30 the ’60s Dance Party began to wind up the day. The grand prize drawing for $10,000 was at 4 p.m.; watch for the full story on winners in the next few days!
The UCLA marching band took to Harker’s Davis Field for pre-game practice this morning. The band, in town for the football game between UCLA and UC Berkeley, ran drills from 9 a.m. to noon, as Harker students and faculty stopped by between classes to watch the fun!
The band’s director, Gordon Henderson, stays in touch with members of Harker’s performing arts and library faculty who are alumni of the UCLA Marching band: Laura Lang Ree, performing arts director; Chris Florio, orchestra director; Dave Hart, middle school music teacher; and Lara Hubel, upper school library clerk. The San Jose Mercury News covered the visit in today’s publication.
This story was originally published in the Fall 2010 issue of Harker Quarterly After more than 18 months of planning, which included the participation of over 580 members of the Harker community, the conceptual design of the Saratoga campus is complete.
This milestone could not have been reached without the generosity of a small group of seed investors; their funds are subsidizing the architectural drawings and the accompanying petition to rezone the Saratoga campus.
The major benefit that will result from the rezoning is that we will be able to build three stories high, four if we go underground, resulting in saving precious green open space for our students and families.
In addition to funding the architectural and permitting fees, the seed investors’ funds will be used to estimate the cost of the project and to cover fundraising expenses.
Annual Giving Pledge Week
Remember to make your Annual Giving pledge by Oct. 10 and be entered in the drawing to win a Napa weekend getaway!
Your contribution to the Annual Giving Campaign supports every single one of our students by helping to fund our many exceptional programs.
Parent Volunteer Breakfasts
As school began, each campus held breakfasts to welcome parents to the new year and show them the many exciting volunteering opportunities available to them. The first such event took place Aug. 23 at the Blackford campus’ multipurpose room. Approximately 150 middle school parents arrived to enjoy a morning meal and visit the tables set up by the various departments. The lower school breakfast on Aug. 27 was held at the Bucknall campus gym and attended by approximately 150 parents, who chatted with other enthusiastic volunteers and signed up to become volunteers themselves. The upper school event was attended by about 50 parents, who gathered at Nichols Hall on Sept. 2. All events featured fresh breakfasts, congenial company and a conversational atmosphere.
This story was originally published in the Fall 2010 issue of Harker Quarterly Students in Harker’s forensics program wrapped up a groundbreaking year with arms full of awards and tournament titles, sweeping high honors around the nation and setting a new bar for the future of Harker’s communication studies department.
The middle school debate team won the 2010 National Junior Forensic League championship in Public Forum Debate in late June, and, for the team’s overall success across events, coach Steve Clemmons, the director of middle school forensics, collected one of five School of Excellence in Debate awards given at the tournament. In 2010 students also received accolades in the Victory Briefs International, the James Logan Invitational, the Public Forum Challenge and the Laird Lewis Invitation.
“We sent the most students in Harker history to the Tournament of Champions and had the top two seeds in Public Forum debate after preliminary rounds at the tournament,” said Carol Green, director of public forum debate, summing up the past year’s accomplishments as groundbreaking. However, while wins are appreciated, the more notable accomplishment in Green’s mind was the sense of team unity.
“Forensics are very much individual sports where students compete to win individual titles in addition to team titles,” Green said. “I am very proud at the work they have done and will continue to do to achieve team success.”
Clemmons shared similar sentiments when looking back on the year’s accomplishments. “The past year was awesome,” Clemmons said. “The students put in so much hard work to accomplish so much personal and competitive growth.”
Summer hardly served as a respite from policy and debate. Coaches continued to teach students at various forensic institutes around the nation, and members of the debate team also attended similar programs.
Green directed, with new communication studies faculty member Greg Achten, the Berkeley Public Forum Institute and also the Forensics Institute on the upper school campus. Additionally, Green and Jonathan Peele, director of congressional debate and individual events, taught at Harvard. Students attended the Harker Forensics Institute and Berkeley Public Forum Institute, but some travelled as far as Florida, Boston and Yale to hone their forensics skills in these intensive programs.
“The students get an opportunity to work with some of the best coaches and professors in the nation,” Green said, describing these summer programs as fun and purposeful. “Students can do intense focus work and get specialized instruction that will add to their skill sets and will also bring new ideas back to the program.”
As we roll into a new school year, the forensics team looks forward to the challenges ahead, and, with Achten joining the upper school staff and Karina Momary, the lower school one, the team is looking for ways to expand and improve.
“The only goal is to get better, and records and awards will always sort themselves out,” Clemmons said.
Green is excited about the year’s prospects. “We have very talented and dedicated students, and I can’t wait to work with them this year,” she said. “We are also blessed to have such a supportive community of parents, faculty, staff and administrators. Without them, our team could never be as large or as successful as we are.”
This story was originally published in the Fall 2010 issue of Harker Quarterly More than 20 teachers returned to campus this summer to focus on new ways to integrate technology into their curricula as part of Harker’s tech grant program, which aims to create more well-rounded and effective lesson plans that expand the school’s area of information literacy.
Each teacher focuses on one piece of technology and learns various ways to integrate its uses into his or her teaching.
Shelby Guarino, grade 5 advanced core English teacher, took this opportunity to expand the global education network by learning how to use Moodle, an open-sourced, community-based software that allows for interactivity.
Before her tech grant, Guarino worked closely with Jennifer Abraham, global education director, to share the students’ work with peers from Harker’s sister schools. “For the past two years, I have been doing some grammar art projects, which I would ask students to donate and mail to some of our sister schools,” Guarino said. “For the two years, it was working great, and finally, the last trimester of last school year, we got some work back.”
A tool already used by the department of global education to connect with sister schools in several places including Japan, Australia, China, Costa Rica and France, Moodle offers a new dimension to Guarino’s teaching, bringing collaboration and sharing to a whole new level. Using the software and exchanging videos, photos, audio files and projects, students in Guarino’s English class can collaborate with students at Saint Stephen’s College in Coomera, Australia, and create a more dynamic connection to learn more about different cultures and activities from other areas of the world.
“The goal is getting it to be part of the regular school day – communicating with peers around the world,” Abraham said. Guarino’s tech grant will introduce Moodle to the lower school campus.
Chrissy Chang, K-8 P.E. department chair, learned to use Athena and Microsoft PowerPoint to make health lectures, documents and resources more easily accessible to eighth graders. “Using Athena allowed me to share the curriculum in an orderly fashion, give easy access to students and, more importantly, to go green,” Chang said.
After attending a local workshop on using authentic sources in Spanish class, Diana Moss and Isabel Garcia, Spanish teachers for the upper and middle schools, respectively, decided to use this opportunity to create a Wikispace “as a vehicle for organizing and sharing the authentic sources we had found over the course of the week,” Moss said. The Wikispace includes links for music, cultural and geographical information about Spanish-speaking countries, literature and grammatical topics in an effort to bring the real world into the classroom.
Scott Kley Contini, grade 8 science teacher, used his grant to develop a blogging project, where students in his classes will write blogs, comment on their peers’ work and create a larger dialogue. Kley Contini noticed that slide shows rarely allowed for constructive discussions and found blogging to be a better alternative. “This will encourage them to communicate a little more as well as force them to really think analytically about what they are writing about,” he said. He hopes the assignment will teach his students to communicate differently and encourage them to come up with original content that none of their peers have previously posted.
Other tech grant projects included learning to use macros and Annotate Pro to grade more easily and efficiently, expanding the use of Audacity and continuing to utilize Athena to create easier file sharing, forums and polls. Aiming to keep curricula fresh, sharpen teachers’ skill sets and utilize alternative teaching resources, the tech grant program has allowed teachers to think outside the box and continue to thrive through Harker’s mission to “achieve academic excellence through the development of intellectual curiosity, personal accountability and love of learning.
Anne West, grade 12, is featured in a front-page article in the Oct. 1 edition of The Wall Street Journal that chronicles her mission to analyze her family’s genome. John, Anne’s father, had the family’s genome sequenced last year after being diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism in 2003. However, the resulting mass of raw data presented the Wests with the problem of compiling the information into something they could interpret.
Nathan Pearson, director of research for Knome, Inc., a personal genomics company, is quoted in the Journal piece as saying, “If you got an auctioneer to read out loud someone’s genome at six letters every second, it would take 34 years to finish.”
Using her family’s computer, Anne West decided to take on the monumental task of boiling down the data, a job typically reserved for large teams of scientists with highly advanced degrees. West, who has had a passion for biology since grade 5, has been using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to decipher the data.
According to the Journal, the work is daunting but rewarding. West spent six months decoding just one of 20,000 genes, but her work has led to some big opportunities, such as her summer stint in the laboratory of Harvard and MIT scientist George Church. In April, she was a speaker at the Genomes, Environments, Traits (GET) Conference in Boston, where she received business cards from scientists in the field. She is also working with researchers in Seattle on a paper that is partly based on the Wests’ genome, and in September traveled to a genomics conference in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., where she appeared as a panelist.
West thanked her science teachers at Harker, saying they played a large part in fostering the love of biology that has led her to this point. She credited Catherine Le, grade 5 science teacher, for sparking her initial decision to pursue biology; Scott Kley Contini, middle school science teacher, for his “rigorous course”; and Gary Blickenstaff, upper school biology teacher, who assisted her with the project and helped with her presentations at the Personal Genomes Conference and the GET Conference. “I’ve worked hard and of my own motivation, but it was never in isolation nor without help,” she said.
The Little Black Dress Party was held in late September to raise funds for the Harker Fashion Show. Attended by about 100 Harker parents, the affair included live entertainment, tarot card and palm readings, plus a splendid variety of foods and cocktails. The event was hosted by parents John and Michelle Keller, who went all out for their guests. “Many enjoyed meeting parents from other grades; or they were new to the school and loved meeting parents who have been at Harker a long time,” said Sue Prutton, director of upper school volunteer programs. The Harker administration is extremely grateful to the Kellers for their generous donation and dedication to making this event a success.
Curbside Crazies, the morning drop off of gifts and prizes for the 60th Harker Family & Alumni Picnic are wrapping up! During the week of Sept. 20 to 24, parent volunteers have been gathering at the curb outside the Blackford and Bucknall campuses each morning during student drop-off to collect donations of prizes for the game booths at this year’s picnic.
Themed the Peace Love Picnic, it will take place Oct. 10 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Blackford campus. The picnic organizers have asked for items such as gift cards, candy, stuffed animals, electronics and room décor. All week, volunteers could be seen carrying colorful signs decorated with 1960s-themed slogans such as “Thanks Man” and “Cash is Cool Too,” for those who didn’t have time to shop but still wanted to donate.
In early September, linksman Maverick McNealy, grade 10, won the Stanford Men’s Golf Club Championship, finishing one under par when the match ended on the 12th hole. This is the second time McNealy, who also plays for Harker, has won the tournament, which is open to all ages. His win last year made him the youngest winner of the event at 13 years, 9 months. In addition, on Sept. 18 he took the Sharon Heights Golf & Country Club Junior Club Championship (ages 15-17) by 17 strokes, shooting a 72. “From previous experience, I knew that, especially in match play, you cannot ease up and play conservatively or you give the other player opportunities to get back into the match; I kept shooting at the flags until the match was over,” said McNealy.
Jerrica Liao, grade 5, brought home two medals from the first Regional Youth Circuit in Northern California, held in Half Moon Bay in late September. Liao, who fences foil for California Fencing Academy, took second in the Youth-10 girls category and third in the Y-12 girls category.
Along with the robust offerings in the Harker/Oakwood Tennis Training System (HOTTS), coach Craig Pasqua is now offering the Quickstart Junior Team Tennis League for ages 6-10. The league is open to the public.
“We started this program to meet the needs of the new player who wants to have fun!” said Pasqua. “QuickStart Tennis fundamentally differs from traditional tennis. In the traditional tennis teaching mode, students are taught how to play tennis. In QST, participants play to learn tennis. They do this by using smaller court dimensions, slower bouncing balls and shorter rackets,” he said.
“For the longest of times, tennis has been taught on regulation-sized, 78-foot courts,” Pasqua added. “To a youngster, that distance seems like a football field! QST uses 36- and 60-foot courts and slower-paced balls to size the game down to a 6-year-old’s level. With the equipment changes, youngsters find the sport less challenging and are able to rally longer and have more fun!” he said.
The first six-week session starts Oct. 2. The group will meet Saturdays from 1-2 p.m. at the Oakwood Tennis Center on Saratoga Avenue. Students will be split by age into two groups, then divided further into teams. Matches will consist of a half-hour team tennis format. The first 10 sign-ups will receive a free racket and beginner rackets will be available for purchase. Registration is open now, with an open house Sat., Sept. 25. See the Tennis page of the Harker website for full details or contact Pasqua at craigp@harker.org or 408.590.7347.