In mid-October grade 9 students spent their “freshmen service day” volunteering at the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden. Freshmen service day is a mandatory, daylong event designed to introduce students to community service.
“Working in the beautiful fall sunshine on their annual day of service, the students gardened in many flower beds – hoeing, weeding and raking. They perfected their wheelbarrow skills, learning the fine art of balancing a full load. With the cooler and shorter days ahead, the roses are now winding down and will soon go dormant for a short period. Because of the teens’ help, the grounds are ready. Thank you volunteers!” wrote San Jose Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services in an appreciative post on their Facebook page.
Prior to his performance at the Harker Concert Series, Milwaukee Symphony Concertmaster and player of the 1715 Lipinski Stradivarius Frank Almond gave a special master class to Harker students in the Nichols Hall auditorium. Almond discussed and taught classical violin techniques to several students, going over concepts such as proper bowing technique, posture and changing the character of notes by holding the bow at various angles.
The Harker Conservatory modernized Shakespeare’s popular tale of love and enchantment in its production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which played at the Blackford Theater Oct. 30-Nov. 1. Director Jeff Draper brought the comedy into the present day, staging the play in a city park setting that occupied the majority of the theater floor, with scenic designer Paul Vallerga strategically placing signs of urbanization throughout: a picnic bench here, a swingset there. This unorthodox set drew the audience closer to the story and also gave them a more well-rounded view of the cast.
Harker’s upper school players buoyantly unfurled the story of arranged marriages, mistaken identities, magical formulas and theatrical ineptitude, giving the play just the right amount of whimsy and charm. Carol Clever’s costume design put the human characters in modern dress while the mischievous, magical fairies were draped in garb that ranged from the regal to the outlandish.
Upper school vocal groups delighted an evening audience in the Nichols Hall auditorium on Nov. 13 with “Ad Amore: Love as a Light,” featuring Bel Canto, Camerata, Guys’ Gig and Cantilena. Bel Canto, directed by Jennifer Sandusky, opened with Michael Praetorius’ “Anima Mea,” the first of a series of songs by European composers, which included the traditional French song “Brilla Brilla Piccola Stella” and “Funiculi, Funicula” by Luigi Denza.
Camerata, the upper school’s mixed chamber ensemble directed by Susan Nace, opened with a pair of hymns – “Barechu” by Salamone Rossi and “Alleluia” by Michael Praetorius – and concluded its set with Adriano Banchieri’s “Contrapunto bestiale alla mente,” which had its singers imitating the sounds of animals over a nonsensical poem sung by the basses.
In a slight departure from its usual fare, the student-run boys group Guys’ Gig began with the traditional “Gaudeamus Igitur,” with an arrangement by Johannes Brahms. Alex Henshall, grade 11, then sang solo on “McDonald’s Girl” by the Harvard Din and Tonics.
Closing the evening was the women’s choir Cantilena, also directed by Nace, who began with the concert’s namesake, “Ad Amore” by Lee Kesselmann, and continued with “Suscepit Israel” from Bach’s “Magnificat.”Following a rendition of Franz Biebl’s haunting “Ave Maria,” Cantilena ended with Greg Jasperse’s dynamic and uplifting “Voice Dance.”
The Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) was the real winner of a students versus faculty/staff basketball game held during a long lunch on Nov.12 in the upper school gym.
The Hoops & Scoops charity basketball game was jointly sponsored by the Harker Disability Awareness Group and the Harker DECA chapter. During the game, members of the two student clubs scooped and served up delicious ice cream sundaes to onlookers. One scoop cost $2, while three scoops went for $5.Proceeds from the event, which totaled $405, benefited the MDA.
“We chose to support the MDA because they are DECA’s largest charitable partner,” said Juston Glass, director of Harker’s business and entrepreneurship program. “Students won, 72-59. But the real winner was MDA.”
The MDA is the world’s leading nonprofit health organization sponsoring research into the causes and effective treatments for neuromuscular diseases. MDA research grants currently support more than 250 projects worldwide.
Prior to the event, upper school students, faculty and staff were invited to sign up for basketball teams that were divided by grade levels. With 10 players per grade, freshman played the first quarter, sophomores played the second, juniors played the third and seniors played fourth.
“We wanted an activity that would involve the whole school and have it be interactive and fun. Having a friendly basketball competition seemed like a great way to do that. Being that it was a physical activity, we were able to truly embrace the MDA’s mission of ‘make a muscle; make a difference.’ We hope it to be the start of an annual tradition,” Glass said.
The Harker business and entrepreneurship department held its inaugural Harker BEcon2014. This business, economics and entrepreneurship conference introduced Harker students, non-Harker students and the Harker community at large to professionals in a variety of fields, including sales, venture capital and economics. The program comprised keynotes and roundtables in business and economics, workshops taught by professionals, student business venture competitions and student presentations.
The daylong event began with a poster session, in which students presented projects they developed during an entrepreneurship course taught by Juston Glass, director of the B.E. department. The adult attendees were very interested in and impressed by the facets of the projects, which ranged from business plans for innovative products to marketing proposals for companies.
Debbie Tranowski, parent of Logan Drazovich, grade 11, commented, “I want to thank you and the students for organizing a very interesting BEcon inaugural event yesterday. Logan, as well as my husband and I, enjoyed the entire event. It was very well organized. We are lucky to have access to so much parent talent within the Harker community. I hope this will be one of many such events in the future.”
Following student presentations, Stanford professor Ran Abramitzky gave a keynote about the economics of education and its effect on decision‐making in secondary education. The auditorium was filled with students eager to learn more about economics and its application to real-life scenarios. Claudia Medina, parent of Adriano Hernandez, grade 9, wrote to the team, “Noya Abramitzky, professor Ran Abramitzky’s wife, stopped by my office [at Stanford University] and told me that Ran was very impressed by the event, the level of service and the Harker school. He told her the event was organized and delivered at ‘Stanford level.’ I wanted to share this kudos with you and your team of students, who did such a wonderful job.”
Students then attended the economics roundtable, sHarker Tank or the resume/interview workshop. The economics roundtable was a Q&A with San Jose State University economics professor Tom Means; Lawrence Wu, president of NERA Economic Consulting; and Jordan Goheen, senior examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank. By far the biggest hit at the conference, sHarker Tank, based on the popular TV show Shark Tank, was designed to give students a mock opportunity to pitch their business ideas to authentic venture capitalists. The highest scoring participants out of 10 prequalified teams advanced to the second round, which involved a sales pitch of an undisclosed product. Neil Movva, grade 12, won the competition with his product, Pathfinder, which aids the blind by utilizing an infrared laser to provide feedback while out in public. Movva was awarded an exclusive mentor luncheon with successful entrepreneur Ashok Krishnamurthi, who participated in the conference. Coming in second place was Yash Narayan, grade 5, with BullyWatch, a product that helps deal with bullying in schools. Third place was given to the team of Vineet Kosaraju, grade 11, Andrew Jin, grade 12, and Rishabh Jain, grade 12, who created a product called InMaps to help large facilities cater to their guests by providing interactive maps of the interiors of their buildings. During the resume/interview workshop, successful businessmen and businesswomen involved in the CareerConnect mentorship and professionalism programs offered demonstrations on powerful interviews and resumes.
“The event was very well-organized and the speakers were great. I personally enjoyed the sHarker Tank the most,” Medina added.
A key aspect of the conference was the mentoring lunch. Attendees enjoyed a wonderful lunch with some of Silicon Valley’s finest. This was a great opportunity for attendees to hear inspirational stories of both success and failure from business professionals.
After lunch, there was a business roundtable with Ashok Krishnamurthi, co-founder of Xsigo Systems and Juniper Networks; Sanjay Sharma, CEO of Roambee Corp.; and Angie Krackeler, program manager at IBM. The participants discussed their paths to success, as well as their points of view on controversial topics in business today. In addition, students participated in economics games including Golden Balls, in which participants engaged in a battle of wits to develop game-theory strategies and defeat opponents, akin to a popular British game show by the same name. Also, students challenged their economics knowledge in a fun and interactive competition to determine the economic king on campus. The conference also featured a Startup 101 workshop, where Pradeep Aswani, founder of Securematics, discussed what it takes to launch a startup; a personal finance workshop, where Amanda Mathias, a certified financial planner and enrolled agent, discussed wealth management; and a sales workshop featuring Freddie Engineer, a regional sales manager for a large company, who taught the most effective methods to move the product from the seller to the consumer.
Jeremy King, CTO of global e-commerce for WalmartLabs, gave the final keynote. He has led the engineering and product aspects as well as the Web operation teams charged with developing Walmart Labs’ online business on a global scale. He talked about his job and his path to becoming an executive at one of the biggest companies on the planet.
Overall, the conference was a success, with nearly 200 attendees, and inspiring speakers and competitions. The BEcon2014 team looks forward to continuing the tradition and making annual improvements.
In mid-November, Harker’s WiSTEM (Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Club held a Diabetes Awareness Week on the upper school campus. The goal was to raise awareness about diabetes and the importance of leading a healthy lifestyle.
WiSTEM’s mission is to foster female students’ interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, to provide role models and mentors in those fields, and to educate the community about gender issues in the sciences.
Under the direction of advisor Anita Chetty, upper school biology teacher and science department chair, the club sponsors guest lecturers, holds technical workshops for the Harker community led by female scientists, and creates a network of female mentors – including Harker alumni –working in STEM fields.
Adele Li, a grade 11 student and WiSTEM member who helped plan Diabetes Awareness Week, reported that the effort was a success. During the week, representatives from the American Diabetes Association were on hand to talk to students about diabetes; Bay Club instructors led a kickboxing class and a Bollywood hip-hop class during lunch; and faculty members led tai-chi and yoga classes.
“We also sold KIND bars, Hint water and Enlightened ice cream bars (yes, healthy ice cream!) during lunch and after school to fundraise for the American Diabetes Association. Additionally, we had a diabetes-friendly option for lunch every single day of the week,” said Li.
The WiSTEM Club also made posters with infographics highlighting diabetes facts, such as that one in 10 Americans has diabetes and 208,000 American children and teenagers have diabetes (with that number growing). Every 17 seconds, someone in the United States is diagnosed with diabetes, according to Diabetes.org.
In other upper school outreach news, in early to mid-December, holiday gifts for children and families in need were collected and delivered by the outreach department to causes including Adopt-a-Family, the Family Giving Tree and Sunday Friends.
This article first appeared on the Web log for the American Association of School Librarians. It is reprinted here by the kind permission of the author, Diane Main, director of learning, innovation and design at Harker.
When I work on family history research, whether it’s for my own tree or a friend’s, I often find I lose track of time, get totally “in the zone,” and sometimes even forget to eat and sleep enough. That combination of little successes and new challenges that pushes me to the edge of my abilities is something that is referred to as “flow.” If you spend a lot of time with kids, you will have seen it when they are playing video games and can’t seem to put them down. For others, it’s reading books or engaging in some hands-on hobby. Flow is the apex of engagement and motivation.
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi pioneered the research into this phenomenon. He was looking into happiness, creativity and motivation, and developed what we now refer to as flow. Flow is doing what you love and what you’re good at, but still being challenged by the activity. We see this in education as well, but sadly we perhaps don’t see it often enough. It is generally thought that the integration of technology into learning environments tends to instantly increase learner motivation and engagement. While this may be true for a short time, unless the use of technology tools builds skills while also presenting appropriate challenges, it loses its motivational value.
As seen in this image from Wikipedia, flow exists at the intersection of high skill level and high challenge level. The emotions that exist in the other regions of the chart are not really what we’re aiming for in learning situations. This can be where games can swoop in to the rescue, as long as their introduction is meaningful and their use well thought-out. Sometimes, it’s great to just have gaming breaks, using games of all kinds, to “reset” the brain and ignite motivation. A quick round of charades or five minutes with Zombie Drop can be a great way to get kids to transition from one activity in class to another.
But there are some games that are becoming the platform for the learning itself, and that are being used for entire class periods over days or even weeks. One such example is MinecraftEDU. Most parents and educators have at least heard of Minecraft. The educational version MinecraftEDU is only available to schools, and it is quickly becoming THE destination for teachers and students who want to maximize learner creativity and engagement in subjects from history and literature to math and science. I teach a computer science course that functions as a survey of the field of computer science without focusing exclusively on programming. We use MinecraftEDU to explore concepts in computer science (such as subroutines, abstraction, conditional statements, loops and algorithms), to engage in the design thinking process by building homes for one another, and to explore introductory level programming with in-game robots called turtles. Instead of learning about our content, my students get the chance to be immersed in a virtual world they can manipulate and learn from.
An unexpected benefit, the first few times I used MinecraftEDU with my high school students, was the community building that seemed to occur instantly when we began to use the game in class. Students who had formerly kept to themselves and not spoken much in class suddenly appeared comfortable with me and the rest of their peers when they started interacting within the game environment. And since most of them had never played Minecraft before, they had a lot to learn, which they did by figuring things out and then teaching each other. Before long, my hesitant high schoolers were losing hours in the game world, building and communicating in ways none of us thought possible. I had stumbled upon a way to bring them to a place of flow. And now I’m hooked too.
By Zach Jones, with additional information provided by debate teachers Carol Green, Jenny Alme and Karina Momary
Students Earn Accolades and TOC Spots at Presentation High
More than 30 Harker students attended the Presentation High School Public Forum Invitational held the weekend of Nov. 8. Eighteen upper school students competed in the varsity division while four upper school and eight middle school students competed in the novice division; three seniors came to the tournament to coach novices.
Two of Harker’s varsity teams made it into the Elite Eight, with one team debating its way to the final two, losing the final round on a 2-1 decision. Seniors Nikhil Kishore and Vamsi Gadiraju rocked their first tournament of the season as final-round participants and earned their first leg to the Tournament of Champions.
Kishore and Gadiraju are the fifth Harker public forum team to earn half of their qualifying legs only two months into the season.
The top eight teams in elimination rounds included the duo known as “The Brothers Lin” – David Lin, grade 12, and his younger brother Jimmy Lin, grade 9.
Sorjo Banerjee, grade 11, was named as the top overall individual speaker at the tournament with five other Harker students being recognized in the top 15 overall.
Success in Minneapolis
Six middle school and 10 upper school students traveled to Apple Valley, Minn., in early November to compete at the MinneApple Debate Tournament. This is the first year Harker middle school students have competed at this high school varsity national invitational and everyone had a wonderful time!
Every team from Harker won at least one of their preliminary rounds, an especially notable accomplishment for the middle schoolers as they were the only grade 7 debaters in the pool of mostly high school juniors and seniors.
Junior Eesha Chona and Joyce Huang, grade 10, were 33rd seed and missed elimination rounds by the speaker point tie-breaker. Juniors Suraj Jagadeesh and Nikhil Bopardikar went undefeated in preliminaries and lost a close match in the first elimination round. Bopardikar was also named seventh overall individual speaker out of more than 200 speakers in the varsity division!
Abhinav Ketineni and Jasmine Liu, both grade 11, also went undefeated in prelims. They lost in the Sweet 16 as did the team of Alexander Lam, grade 10, and David Jin, grade 11. Both teams earned their first of two qualifying legs to the Tournament of Champions. Ketineni was also the ninth overall individual speaker.
Sorjo Banerjee and sophomore Emaad Raghib represented Harker all the way to the Elite Eight, losing in the quarterfinal round. They also picked up their first leg to the Tournament of Champions.
Middle School Holds Intramural Speech and Debate Tournament
On Oct. 30, 85 middle school students and their parents participated in the October Intramural Speech and Debate Tournament. Each student competed in three competitive rounds against other Harker students to practice and get a feel for what a competitive round is like. Parents and high school students volunteered as judges. The event was run in a timely fashion, with more than 50 total speech and debate rounds taking place on a Thursday evening.
Each year, the upper school Lead and Read program brings Student Council and Honor Council officers to the lower school campus to read stories to the grade 1 classes. The event takes place about eight times a year, most recently on Oct. 16.
The program was started by Gautam Krishnamurthi ’11 when he was a senior. His mother, Deepa Iyengar, continues to come a few times a year to read to the first graders in Cindy Proctor’s homeroom.
“Deepa came last week with the family dog, Scannon (bought at the Harker Fashion Show). The students loved having them both visit!” shared Proctor.