At the United Spirit Association Dance Camp, held in July at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Harker varsity and junior varsity dancers won a number of awards and earned the privilege of performing in Hawaii and London. Students in attendance at the camp were grade 12 students Ria Desai, Michaela Kastelman and Molly Wolfe, grade 11 student Jenny Dai, grade 10 students Noel Banerjee, Darby Millard, Erika Olsen and Jacqui Villarreal and grade 9 students Selin Ozcelik, Emily Pan, Kristen Park, Ankita Sharma and Madison Tomihiro.
The camp featured classes on technique and choreography and also featured a number of competitive challenges. Under the guidance of dance teachers Amalia De La Rosa and Karl Kuehn, the dancers won several awards. Kastelman, Millard and Villarreal were recognized as All-American dancers, an honor that included an invitation to perform in London with the United Spirit Association. For their overall technique and performance acumen, Kastelman, Banerjee, Millard and Villarreal all received Super Sensational ribbons. Millard and Kastelman reached the final round of competition and were among the top 10 dancers at the camp.
The Harker dance group was awarded a “Superior” plaque, the highest group recognition at the camp, and was invited to perform at next year’s NFL Pro Bowl in Hawaii. They also won the teamwork challenge and received an award for being the most-improved team at the camp.
Desai’s and Sharma’s efforts in drill classes earned them first-place ribbons and Park and Ozcelik received second-place ribbons. In the drill competition, Sharma received a medallion for her second-place finish.
Andrew Wang and Namrata Vakkalagadda, both grade 11, attended the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership Northern California Seminar in mid-June, held at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga. Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership (HOBY for short) is a national organization that seeks to build principles of service and leadership in high school students. Students are selected by their schools to participate in HOBY events, where they participate in leadership-building activities, hear from important figures in a variety of fields and more.
“There were many activities that essentially made us ask ourselves how we would behave in certain circumstances that questioned our decision-making skills or our opinions,” said Wang, who said he met many new friends at the conference. “The activities ranged from building a tower with pipe cleaners to creating a mock business operation that interacted with other similar groups.”
Students also learned about different types of leadership, such as personal leadership, group leadership and society leadership.
“One of my favorite activities was where we answered a set of questions and found out which ‘color’ we are. Each color represented certain qualities that person possesses,” Vakkalagadda said. People of the same color were then put into groups and told to build a tower with the materials provided. “Each group had a very different experience, but all the towers failed. The activity showed us how all four types of leadership are needed to keep any type of organization or group running.”
Speakers at the conference included college counselors, service leaders and representatives from nonprofits. Vakkalagadda particularly enjoyed a presentation by Stephen Amundson, who heads a program called Reach Out and Impact a Life. “His speech that targeted the main skills needed by a group leader was not only informative, but also interactive as well as fun,” Vakkalagadda said. “He made his entire program enjoyable for the audience and yet still managed to strongly pass along his message.”
Erik Andersen, grade 12, helped one of the United States teams win first place at the International Linguistics Olympiad in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Andersen, who heads the Harker Language and Linguistics Club, also won a bronze medal for himself in the individual competition. Nearly 30 countries sent teams to the Olympiad, which had a total of 131 contestants.
Each team was required to translate the name of a country written in Lao, the official language of Laos. Contestants were also asked to guess how the countries’ Lao names would be pronounced. Competitors in the individual competitions solved problems that dealt with the Dyirbal, spoken by Australian Aborigines in northeast Queensland, the Umbu-Ungu and Teop languages of Papua New Guinea, Basque and the language of the Rotuman people of the Colony of Fiji.
Anderson qualified for the team after being one of the top 18 students to participate in this year’s North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO), in which he received an award for having the best solution to a problem dealing with the Aboriginal Australian Wanyi language. Approximately 1,000 students participate in the NACLO each year.
For the last four years, Jaap Bongers, Harker’s upper school art department instructor and chair, has used the summer break as a unique opportunity to personally donate items to needy children in the Republic of Zambia, a landlocked country in Southern Africa.
“I have been going there every summer and one time I even went during the Christmas break,” said Bongers, explaining that, in preparation for the annual sojourn, he uses the school year to collect toys, children’s clothes and children’s books (many of which have been donated by Harker students) for the Zambian children.
Come summer, he fills a big plastic storage box with the donated items which he takes with him to Zambia. There, he donates the toys, books and clothes to the neediest children he encounters.
“I do this while traveling to very remote villages where there are still wonderful ages-old original culture. Initiation rituals, traditional dances by masked actors and healing ceremonies by witch doctors can still be found although it is getting harder and harder to locate them.”
After handing out and emptying the storage box of donated toys, Bongers then re-fills it with ancient traditional artifacts he discovers and buys on his travels. “I note down their use, meaning and age. I have found objects and heard about customs that were not yet known. Once I return to Harker I use this information, the items and the pictures for my Study of Visual Art class,” he said, noting that his house is filling up with an impressive collection of ancient traditional African art.
A particularly interesting find this year was an old food box from the Lozi tribe, which Zambian women use to present food to their husbands. In addition to discovering such treasures, Bongers also enjoyed such cultural experiences as buying an ancient artifact from a witch doctor, watching a traditional masked dance at night in Kaoma, and meeting Makishi dancers near Mongu in the Western Province.
The remote villages that Bongers visits are reminiscent of the hunter-gatherers and migrating tribes who inhabited the country for thousands of years before Zambia was claimed and occupied by the British as protectorate of Northern Rhodesia towards the end of the 19th century. In 1964, the protectorate gained independence with the new name of Zambia, derived from the Zambezi River which flows through the country.
Zambia’s economy has been traditionally dominated by the copper mining industry, however, during the 1970s, the country began sliding into a poverty from which it has not yet recovered – which is why the donated goods Bongers collects during the school year and hands out in the summer are so appreciated.
In the spring, Harker upper school students participated in the annual Physics Bowl, organized by the American Association of Physics Teachers, and finished with the top overall Division II team score. Harker was also the highest-scoring Division I school in its region. Ashvin Swaminathan, grade 12, was one of the top 10 overall division II scorers, and Rahul Sridhar, grade 11, was the highest Division II scorer in his region.
Every year, an estimated 10,000 students participate in the Physics Bowl, in which students take a test administered by the participating schools. First-year physics students are placed in the Division I category, and second-year physics students take the test in the Division II category. Each division is made up of 15 regions.
Four recent graduates and two upper school student musicians with the San Francisco Symphony’s Youth Orchestra participated in the Symphony’s European tour from June 20 to July 7. Cellist Melody Huang, cellist Jeffrey Kwong, violist Jessica Shen and flautist Pavitra Rengarajan, all recent graduates, as well as flautist Apoorva Rangan, grade 10, and violinist Ashvin Swaminathan, grade 12, traveled to Germany, Luxembourg and Austria, playing to audiences in several of Europe’s most famous concert halls.
The orchestra performed four concerts in Germany at the University of Regensburg, Munich Philharmonie, Rheingau Musik Festival and the Berlin Philharmonie. One concert was performed in the quaint Luxembourgish border town of Echternach at the prestigious Festival International Echternach, and the final concert was performed at Salzburg in Austria. The Youth Orchestra performed in the same concert halls that the San Francisco Symphony performs in during their European tour.
The SFS Youth Orchestra was a hit with critics, including Klaus Geitel, one of Berlin’s most prominent classical music critics. Additionally, the Youth Orchestra visited Weimar, where the famous composer Franz Liszt lived. They also visited Leipzig, where Johann Sebastian Bach lived and died, and attended a service at the St. Thomas Church where Bach used to be an organist and which is also his final resting place. In Salzburg, they visited the house where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born and lived as a child with his family.
It’s not every day Harker librarians get the opportunity to spread their passion for reading by handing out free copies of their favorite books to an unsuspecting public.
Armed with a fierce belief in the power of the written word, two Harker librarians joined fellow bookworms from across the United States in participation of World Book Night, an ambitious campaign to give away half a million books for free in just one day.
On April 23, Lauri Vaughan, upper school campus librarian and Bernie Morrissey, middle school librarian, undertook the concerted effort to promote the joy of reading – one person at a time. From Kodiak, Ala., to Key West, Fla., in 6,000 towns and cities across America, volunteers like Vaughan and Morrissey went out into the community in order to share books in locations as diverse as hospitals, nursing homes, schools, ballparks, mass transit, diners and more.
Volunteers were given 20 specially printed copies of their stated favorite books, personally giving them away to new or light readers. They tried to reach many people in underserved places, knowing that a book has the power to open up the doors to new possibilities, and help make the world a better place.
American booksellers and publishers partnered with the first World Book Night in the U.S., following the impressive launch of this campaign by their bookselling and publishing colleagues in the U.K. and Ireland last year. This year, World Book Night took place in the U.K., U.S., and Germany, with thousands of volunteers going out into their communities to give away the special free paperbacks.
Vaughan, who is vice president of the Bay Area Independent School Librarian Association, chose to give out 20 copies of Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” at the Summit Store on Summit Road in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
“I gave away 20 copies … it was so fun! I had to convince shoppers in about 10 seconds they should take the book from me. I had about a 90 percent success rate – almost anyone who listened took a copy of the book. Some needed convincing, but I loved the guy who said, ‘I know this book!’ and snatched it out of my hand. Overall it was a wonderful experience and gave me a great opportunity to practice my reading evangelism in public. It took me about a half hour to give away all 20 copies of ‘Ender’s Game,’” recalled Vaughan.
Meanwhile, Morrissey took to the streets of San Francisco, handing out his beloved copies of Patti Smith’s “Just Kids” at the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus’ rehearsal. “All 20 copies were gone in less than five minutes. I had announced the event in email and Facebook messages ahead of time, but some who didn’t get the message were suspicious about something being offered for free, with no strings attached. If given the opportunity, I would definitely participate again next year, probably by standing at the corner of 18th and Castro, handing out books in a much less structured environment,” he said.
The books, whittled down to 30 popular titles, were chosen by a panel of booksellers and librarians through several rounds of voting. The printing of the free books was possible due to generosity of the authors, publishers and book manufacturing companies.
Examples of some of the books handed out included: “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou (Ballantine), “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic), “Blood Work” by Michael Connelly (Grand Central), “Zeitoun” by Dave Eggers (Vintage), “The Stand” by Stephen King (Anchor) and “My Sister’s Keeper” by Jodi Picoult (Atria).
World Book Night in the U.S. is a nonprofit organization, backed by publishers, Barnes & Noble, the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association, Ingram Content Group, United Parcel Services, and more than a dozen printers and paper companies.
Anna Quindlen, the U.S. campaign’s Honorary National Chairperson, said: “What’s better than a good book? A whole box of them, and the opportunity to share them with new readers. The idea behind World Book Night is inspired, and as a writer and a reader I’m thrilled to be part of it.”
Harker’s budding painters, photographers and mixed media gurus participated in two local art competitions in April and May, coming away with some prestigious awards. The office of Congressman Mike Honda held its annual “An Artistic Discovery” art contest on April 24.
The contest was open to students residing or going to school within the 15th Congressional District (which includes Harker). Winners included Anika Radiya-Dixit, grade 11, for best discussion piece, Sanjana Baldwa, grade 12, for best work in photography and Aditya Sastry, grade 12, for honorable mention in photography. Well done!
The museums of Los Gatos held “Social Matters,” a juried art exhibition at the Los Gatos Art Museum on May 9. The competition asked grade 9-12 students from around Santa Clara County: “What matters?” Awards ranged from being selected as an exhibited work to a grand prize award of $5,000.
Artists also could choose to include their framed pieces in a silent auction. Congratulations to Kacey Fang, grade 9, Tara Rezvani, grade 11, and Karen Wang, grade 12, whose art was exhibited and shown in the museum’ art reception.
Members of Harker’s Key Club had a busy and productive spring, collecting clothing, toys, food and animal carrier crates for the Sacred Heart Community Center and raising some $1,100 for the Silicon Valley Humane Society.
The funds were raised by selling baked goods, bagels, and root beer floats. Additionally, one student opted to anonymously donate $500 towards the cause.
Kerry Enzensperger, director of the upper school community service and activity program, reported that Key Club participants were thrilled with the results.
The Key Club is part of an international high school organization sponsored by Kiwanis International. Key Club members assist Kiwanis in carrying out its mission to serve the children of the world.
High school student members of the club perform acts of service in their communities, such as cleaning up parks, collecting clothing and organizing food drives. They also learn leadership skills by running meetings, planning projects and holding elected leadership positions at the club, district and international levels.
Harker’s InvenTeam visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in June for this year’s EurekaFest, an annual event held by Lemelson-MIT for young inventors. New Harker graduates Prag Batra, Sachin Jain and Arihant Jain, along with grade 12 students Shantanu Joshi, Wilbur Yang and Ramakrishnan Menon and grade 11 student Nikhil Dilip, were at the event to showcase the invention that won them funding in this year’s InvenTeam contest. Their project, an aquatic thermoelectric generator that can produce solar energy without the need for expensive panels, won them a $9,110 grant in the fall of last year to build a prototype.
During their time at the event, the team toured MIT’s wind tunnels and fusion lab, and participated in a 20-minute design challenge in which they were randomly placed into teams which were then instructed to build a free-standing structure made with balloons. They also attended presentations that showed them how to market their inventions, and saw presentations by the collegiate and industrial winners of the InvenTeam competition.