This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
For the last three years the upper school’s Junior Classical League has sponsored a Sadie Hawkins dance as a fundraiser for charity. The proceeds this year totaled $700 and were given to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), an organization that responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people to survive and rebuild their lives.
The IRC was founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein. It offers life-saving care and life-changing assistance to refugees forced to flee from war or disaster in more than 40 countries. The purpose of the Junior Classical League is to encourage an interest in and an appreciation of the language, literature and culture of ancient Greece and Rome.
“[Fellow Latin teacher] Scott Paterson and I have always chaperoned the Sadies dance and other teachers have graciously donated their time for the event,” reported John Hawley, upper school Latin teacher.
In a thank you letter to Hawley, David Miliband, president of the IRC, stressed his gratitude for Harker’s gift, which will help his organization further its ongoing mission of aiding people on their journeys “from harm to home.”
He also wrote that the students’ gift enabled his organization to deliver emergency health care, clean water, counseling, safe spaces for children and other aid to families caught in crisis in the Middle East, South Sudan and elsewhere around the world. The gift will also go to assist thousands of newly settled refugees as they rebuild lives in 22 cities throughout the U.S.
“Your contribution is also allowing us to provide vital assistance to communities in Pakistan, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other countries as they rebuild their hospitals, schools and other crucial infrastructure in the aftermath of conflict or natural disaster,” said Miliband in the note.
This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
In August, members of Harker’s varsity and JV dance teams attended a four-day dance camp with the United Spirit Association at University of California, Santa Cruz. Harker received the highest award – a superior – for choreography, and the team also was honored with the “Hardest Working Team” plaque.
Individual awards were given to Emily Pan and Ankita Sharma, grade 11, for their drill-down technique. Meanwhile, among the 150 participants, Noel Banerjee, Darby Millard, both grade 12, and Liana Wang, grade 9, were recognized as All-American dancers, earning an invitation to perform in London.
While it is always amazing to be awarded for hard work and technique, “the most memorable part of camp was being told by the USA instructors that Harker’s dancers were incredibly polite, dedicated, humble and supportive of both their team members and the other participating schools,” noted Karl Kuehn, dance team director. “Their passion to learn and grow as dancers fueled the team’s success, and I could not be more proud of this fantastic group of students.”
This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Helen Wu, grade 12, who was selected to play and travel with the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America this summer, embarked on a two-week national tour in late July that included performances at Carnegie Hall, Seiji Ozawa Hall in Massachusetts, Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago, Green Music Center at Sonoma State University, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and more. Wu is one of only three violinists from California who were selected to join the prestigious orchestra this summer!
“This is one of the greatest accomplishments and honors a Harker instrumentalist has ever achieved, so I’m really proud to share it with you,” said Chris Florio, leader of The Harker School Orchestra.
This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
This summer the business and entrepreneurship department focused on following up its outstanding first year with an even stronger second year.
In July, Harker’s DECA chapter’s operations team traveled to Phoenix to attend the Emerging Leader Summit. At the event, which featured DECA leadership from across the U.S. and Canada, students attended workshops aimed at helping them improve the Harker chapter. The team also showed off its plan for its upcoming DECA Launch2014 event, which won an award for the best project model.
The summer’s headline event was the University of Pennsylvania Wharton Entrepreneurship in the Classroom program. The program brought Wharton professor Keith Weigelt to Harker to teach 20 student attendees about entrepreneurship through lectures and activities that ranged from composing a business plan to running a business. The weeklong program challenged the students as they spent entire days learning from the professor and working in small groups.
For their business, the students decided to model the Harker Incubator program, which is designed to encourage young entrepreneurs to develop their ideas and build companies. The students broke into four teams that focused on finance, operations, bench- marking and marketing. After working on these four areas, the team united to present the business plan for the Harker Incubator.
The summer events finished strong with the inaugural DECA Launch2014 event. Held the week before the school year began, the event’s goal was to re-energize current DECA membersand introduce new members to the chapter, as well as get the entire chapter’s competitive instincts ready for an intense DECA year.
The two-day event featured teaching, collaborative activities, keynote presentations, lectures and role-playing. The first teaching event, geared toward giving new students an overview of the DECA chapter’s divisions and activities, was capped off with a delicious Chipotle-catered burrito lunch. The second teaching event was an introduction to the many competitions that the DECA chapter will compete in during the 2014-15 school year.
After a number of speakers and role-playing events the second day, Launch2014 closed with a ceremony where parents could view the results of students’ hard work.
The DECA chapter and the B.E. department now look forward to the upcoming year. Highlights include the opening of the Innovation Center on the upper school campus. The center, lined with whiteboard walls, is designed to foster collaboration in a totally modular environment, with moveable tables, chairs, and a top-notch audio visual system. Students will gather in the center to discuss their ideas, akin to brain-storming sessions held at local tech companies.
In October, the B.E. department will introduce its newest event: a business and economics convention titled BECon2014. The department’s 80 students will be expected to present at the convention, alongside a number of Stanford scholars, who will present their ongoing work and lead student discussions.
This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
In late July, 10 upper school students embarked on a summer research trip to Costa Rica, where they had the unique opportunity to perform field research with working scientists and experience the country’s lush beauty.
After spending a relaxing first day in the Costa Rican capital city of San José, the group departed for the La Cusinga Lodge in Uvita. While walking on the beach, the students also were fortunate enough to observe a sea turtle laying her eggs. “They got to observe the entire process up close and we were able to get back to the lodge by 10 p.m.,” said upper school chemistry teacher and trip chaperone Smriti Koodanjeri.
The next day was packed with thrills, as the students went river and ocean kayaking before jumping into the water with snorkeling equipment. “We did more kayaking after the swim and also learned how to find, shuck and open coconuts with only a large stick and a rock,” Koodanjeri said. That evening, the students attended a lecture about how geographic information systems (GIS) are used to keep tabs on marine mammals such as whales and dolphins.
Over the next few days, the students worked on their research projects at Cabo Blanco Natural Reserve and the Monteverde Institute. At Cabo Blanco, the students went on a guided snorkeling exhibition and took part in a field research exercises, where they collected and identified shells and used the data collected to estimate the number of snail species in the area. “The controlled collection and analysis took most of the afternoon and was an excellent introduction into drawing quantitative conclusions even with a limited data set,” Koodanjeri said.
At the Monteverde Institute, the students analyzed the data they had gathered at Cabo Blanco and used it to create research projects that they later presented at a small conference. For their hard work, the students each received a certificate from the University of Georgia, which has a campus in Monteverde.
On their final night, the students went hiking through the Tirimbina rainforest.
This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Over the summer, seven Harker journalism students – chaperoned by journalism teacher Ellen Austin and librarian Lauri Vaughan – ventured to the Hawaiian island of Maui to bolster their skill sets in preparation for the 2014-15 school year.
“The goal of the trip was to realize what we needed to improve upon and learn the steps to take in order to get where we wanted to be,” said journalism student Jacqui Villarreal, grade 12. During the trip, the yearbook staff had the honor of working with Laura Parker and Tina Cleavelin of Jostens, the company that prints the yearbook. “Not only did they open our eyes about what we could do differently, they also created fun for us to have after a six-hour work session,” Villarreal recalled.
Villarreal said the trip inspired them to change the design principles and work flow in the journalism department.
This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
In June, more than a dozen upper school students, accompanied by upper school science teachers Anita Chetty and Mike Pistacchi, embarked on an eye-opening trip to Tanzania.
Students had amazing interactions with some of Tanzania’s tribal people. The Hadzabe people are the oldest hunter-gatherer tribe. They speak with clicks and are entirely unfamiliar with cities or cars. The tribe welcomed the students to their village, sharing stories about their lives and culture. The chief of the tribe taught the students how to build a fire and to use a bow and arrow before taking them on a two-hour hunting excursion through the wilderness. Before parting ways with the Hadzabe, the group delivered medical and diagnostic equipment that they had raised money to purchase.
During their visit with the Maasai village of Esilalei, the students ran an eye clinic, fitting and delivering 50 pairs of glasses that they had collected from Harker community donations, in addition to donating 15 goats. Harker’s Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (WiSTEM) organization also donated uniforms and book bags for 40 children, enabling them to attend school.
While on safari through Tanzania’s Tarangire and Serengeti national parks and the Ngorogoro Crater, the students had the rare opportunity to see the Big Five over two separate days: elephant, rhino, leopard, lion and Cape buffalo. Students also saw a cheetah stalk, chase and kill a gazelle. During a Jeep tour of Tarangire National Park, the students observed impalas, elephants and a herd of more than 500 buffalo. At one point, several female and baby elephants wandered to within 20 feet of the group, who gladly took pictures.
This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Since their foundings in 2009 and 2011, respectively, the John Near history endowment and the Mitra humanities endowment have become symbols of the Harker community’s dedication to helping students pursue a broad array of interests. The endowments have funded 21 meticulously researched historical analyses to date.
Established after the 2009 passing of beloved history teacher John Near and funded by his parents, Jim and Pat Near, The John Near Excellence in History Education Endowment echoes Near’s passion for history education. In addition to funding the continued development of the John Near Resource Center, the endowment provides students with opportunities to do high-level academic research on their chosen historical topics.
Two years later, Harker parents Samir and Sundari Mitra (Sachin ‘10; Shivani ‘13) established The Mitra Family Endowment for the Humanities, a $100,000 fund that further expands research opportunities into areas such as philosophy, languages and the arts. This endowment exemplifies the Mitras’ “whole mission” philosophy, which emphasizes not just mathematical and scientific know-how but also the ability to know what people need, “so that you can create something to help make the world a better place,” said Joe Rosenthal, executive director of advancement.
Each year, Harker seniors submit proposals on topics in history and the humanities that they would like to explore. Those chosen to receive Near and Mitra grants are then assigned a faculty mentor and spend the next year researching and writing their papers. Their journeys often lead to fascinating discoveries. Shivani Mitra, one of the first Mitra scholars, traveled to Mexico City to speak with members of Frida Kahlo’s family for her project on the life and impact of the legendary painter and feminist icon. She also unearthed archival photos that provided further insight into Kahlo’s life and how it influenced her work.
“We had so much fun,” said history department chair Donna Gilbert, who mentored Mitra during her research. “Neither of us had seen any of those archival photographs before.”
Gilbert and Library Director Sue Smith, who evaluate and approve student proposals for the grants, admitted to trepidation about the programs upon their initial launch. “That first year, we kind of held our breath; we weren’t sure if anyone was even going to want to do it,” Gilbert said.
“Are they going to line up to do independent research in their senior year that’s going to take hours and hours of their time?” Smith remembered asking at the time.
Their concerns were allayed both by the response to the grant programs, which attracted dozens of applicants this past school year, and the quality of the resulting papers. Students have begun asking about the grants as early as grade 9, “and not just as a resume builder, but with a genuine interest in a topic,” Gilbert said.
The grant programs also have acted as a source of professional development for the faculty mentors, who often find themselves caught up in the subjects that the students are studying. “We’re all intellectually interested ourselves,” Smith said. “I’ve watched mentors do research simultaneously with the kids to stay one step ahead so that they can help them.”
Just this summer, Smith bumped into Apoorva Rangan, grade 12 and one of this year’s Near scholars, and found herself in a conversation about Rangan’s research on news coverage of the Vietnam War and the resulting tension between news media and the federal government. The discussion turned to how Rangan planned to focus her project after learning how the Freedom of Information Act affected television coverage of the war. “She’s seeing things in history colliding and questioning what affected what,” Smith said. “Those kinds of things sustain those of us in education for weeks at a time.”
For Rangan, the importance of the Near and Mitra grants lies in how they reinforce Harker’s mission to help students discover and foster their love for any topic. “The grants haven’t just enhanced learning opportunities for the scholars,” Rangan said. “They’ve helped bring balance to the entire student body. They’ve helped emphasize to students that you can make any subject as rigorous as you want it to be.”
The grants also provide additional motivation for students to excel in social studies and the humanities, something to which Rangan can personally attest. “When I was thinking about proposal topics for the grant, I found myself more involved and engaged in my history classes,” she said.
In their proposals, students frequently cite work they have done in previous years, Smith said. “Oftentimes they provide a resume in their application for the grant,” she said. “The point is that they see our research scope and sequence in the history department as preparation.”
The effort and passion that goes into these projects also can have lasting effects that extend far beyond the students’ high school careers. While working on her paper about the impact of the feminist and civil rights movements on the disability rights movement of the 1960s and ’70s, Near scholar Zina Jawadi ’13, who is hearing impaired, also began devising a plan for how to improve the lives of people with disabilities, particularly the removal of barriers to educational opportunities.
For Jawadi, one of the greatest benefits of being a Near scholar was the mentorship she received from Smith and history teacher Ruth Meyer, both of whom offered advice on how to create a paper that would bolster her long-term goals. “Dr. Meyer and Ms. Smith mentioned in my first meeting in senior year that I should focus on the history of the disability rights movement rather than the policy change,” she said.
“Dr. Meyer then explained that the policy change paper could have more of an impact in the real world, if I published [it] in a few years, once I have established my advocacy work, and once I have solidified my [knowledge of the] historical background of the disability rights movement.”
Though they are happy with the grant programs as they currently exist, Gilbert and Smith have discussed some possible future improvements. Gilbert would like to see Near and Mitra scholars share and discuss their work with the community more often, hoping that “students will see research not necessarily as a burden or as … just another assignment that they have to check off, but [as] transformative.”
Another possibility is adding more multimedia elements, such as links to videos or sounds embedded into the electronic versions of the papers. “When somebody interviews Frida Kahlo’s family, it would be fabulous to be able to have a video clip embedded in the paper,” Smith said.
Above all, Gilbert and Smith hope that the grants continue in their mission to offer research opportunities to students who wish to explore the subjects they love.
“I feel like we are so in touch with the kids’ interests and can support them in this program,” Smith said. “This is the ultimate individualized learning program.”
Mitra and Near Scholar papers have all been summarized and the summaries can be found in Harker News at news. harker.org; search “endowment.” The papers themselves can be found on our website at http://library.harker.org/nearmitra.
This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Good morning. I would like to welcome the classes of 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015 to the 2014 matriculation ceremony. Matriculation is a ceremony initiated with the first class of the Harker upper school, the Class of 2002. During this ceremony new students to the upper school take an oath promising to follow the Honor Code, a document written by students in the early years of the Harker upper school and updated periodically. The Honor Code outlines how students as a community wish to live together and wish to be treated by each other. Honesty and respect, for instance, are important tenets of the Honor Code.
Each year I begin matriculation with an aspiration I have for the students for the school year. Because I have basically invited myself to speak at both matriculation and graduation, and I have accepted my own invitation, I try to confine my remarks to one page of single- space, size-12 font. I am adapting my aspiration for you this year from a TED talk given by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of “Thinking Fast and Slow.” Kahneman begins his TED talk by pointing out that studies of happiness are often confused by a lack of clarity around which self’s happiness we are discussing, the “experiencing self” or the “remembering self.”
What are the experiencing and remembering selves? According to Kahneman, the experiencing self is the self who lives his life from moment to moment; the remembering self is the self who thinks about his life. The experiencing self is the self the doctor inquires about when he pokes you and asks, “Does this hurt?” The remembering self is the self he inquires about when he asks how you have been feeling over the last few weeks. If you go on vacation, the self who is enjoying each moment is the experiencing self; the self who is planning the vacation beforehand and recalling it fondly while looking at pictures afterward is the remembering self. The experiencing self is your life and the remembering self thinks about your life. What is my hope for you this year? My hope for you this year is that you achieve a healthy balance between your experiencing self and your remembering self.
We need both selves. If we only had the experiencing self, we would live like a piece of music in which each note has no relation to the note that went before or the note that comes after. I think we all know people like this, and in some ways kids live more as an experiencing self. We need the remembering self to have what the philosopher Alan Watts calls “resonance.” It isn’t much good to be happy unless you know you are happy. Memory and metacognition are forms of feedback that give life resonance, just as good acoustical feedback gives our voice resonance. The remembering self is a kind of a neurological echo.
However, we can live under the tyranny of the remembering self, especially in high school. The remembering self compares with others, makes judgments, sets expectations and plans. The remembering self, when hyperactive, can create the same kind of zaniness that occurs when we have too much feedback, like when a cave produces too much echo or when we are overthinking a performance. Here is one of Alan Watts’ favorite limericks:
“There once was a man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, yet what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.”
Kahneman asks what kind of vacation you would choose if you could take no pictures and your memory would be wiped upon return? High school is a time for planning and preparing, but what kind of life would you plan if your experiencing self, not your remembering self, were choosing? Too often we choose a path based on the remembering self’s ideas, not the experiencing self’s intuition. Whichever path you choose, hopefully your experiencing self will have some say and will be there to experience the joy of your flourishing.Living too much with the remembering self can remove us from the life all around us. John Lennon sang in his song “Beautiful Boy,” “Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.” By achieving the right balance between the experiencing and remembering selves, we hope that you will find the life that is waiting for you, both this year and beyond. Thank you.
Representatives from Harker joined parents, students, educators and the general public at Stanford University for an engaging discussion about how to help students balance academic achievement with personal well-being.
The Sept. 26 event was part of a larger conference called “Success By Design: Is It Possible?” sponsored by Challenge Success, a nonprofit group associated with Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. Held in the university’s Memorial Auditorium, it featured Challenge Success co-founders Denise Pope and Madeline Levine.
Other speakers included Wendy Mogel, clinical psychologist and author of New York Times bestselling book “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” (and follow-up book “The Blessing of a B Minus”), and Dave Evans, a lecturer in Stanford’s product design program and co-founder of Electronic Arts.
Two Harker upper school students, Austin Lai, grade 12, and Naomi Molin, grade 11, also spoke at the event, which Challenge Success called its “biggest parent education event of the year.”
“Austin and Naomi spoke alongside some of the most well-respected educational authors, parental experts and voices on topics related to student wellness. Austin read his compelling personal narrative, then Naomi informed the packed audience about some of the recent efforts Harker made to further the engagement and wellness of our student body,” reported Jennifer Gargano, assistant head of school, academic affairs.
The annual event marked 11 years that Challenge Success educators have collaborated with more than 100 schools. Participants from almost 30 middle school and high schools gathered for the conference.
“Throughout the conference, when I mentioned I was from Harker, I consistently heard how great our students are. I know many were impressed by the maturity of both Austin and Naomi,” said Gargano.