This story was originally published in the Spring 2012 issue of Harker Quarterly
Harker’s upper school was recently selected to be the site of a study, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), on how influenza and other diseases are transmitted from one person to another.
Headed by Dr. Marcel Salathé, who leads a group of researchers based at Penn State, the Harker Influenza Project was kicked off in January and is being helped by several teams of Harker students, each working on a project that will further the goal of discovering how disease spreads. On Jan. 24, March 2 and March 13, those taking part in the project wore motes (small electronic tracking devices worn around the neck) that recorded data on where they went and who they interacted with during the day. Whenever one mote wearer came within close enough proximity with another, the motes would record one another’s number, as well as that of the stationary motes that were placed in every room on campus.
Salathé previously conducted research on the upper school campus during the 2009-10 school year. His findings were published in the prestigious “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” and he received a $1.4 million grant from the CDC to continue his research. Because the previous project enjoyed a 95 percent participation rate, Salathé again opted to conduct research at Harker. This time, he and his team have help from several specially selected Harker juniors, who are leading the project groups.
One of the student projects, led by Michael Cheng, is the development of an application for smart phones that collects data on a person’s movements using a phone’s GPS capabilities. “Once started, the app will get a GPS reading every time the user moves a certain distance, which it will store along with a time stamp,” Cheng said. The goal of the application is to build upon the information recorded by the motes. “When the user has an Internet connection, the app will send the phone ID, name and location to the student server,” he said. The students have been helped during this project by Harker parent Somnath Banerjee (Nila, grade 10), who provided advice when the app was being planned and will be available for assistance when the students encounter a problem in testing.
Suchita Nety is heading up two teams responsible for finding out how environmental factors contribute to the spread of disease. One team, led by Ilsa Zhang, is researching how airflow can affect influenza outbreaks by examining carbon dioxide levels in rooms on campus.
“The CO2 team is gathering data using sensors which store data on CO2 levels, humidity and temperature, as well as examining air samples for microbes,” Nety said. “This data will reveal how the ventilation in a room, along with humidity and temperature, affects the number of airborne particles suspended in the air, as well as the likelihood of airborne transmission.”
Another team is examining surfaces on the upper school campuses for bacteria to gain insight on how disease can spread via contact with tables and countertops. “I really looked forward to the hands-on laboratory experience of actually swabbing the tables and visually seeing the bacteria that will be collected,” said chief researcher Andrew Luo. The team is swabbing surfaces and using Petri dishes to view the bacteria found on the various surfaces around campus.
Indulaxmi Seeni’s team is comparing data recorded by motes to the information received through surveys done by the mote wearers. “Our goal is to determine by how much the two differ and to find a way to interpret the data most accurately,” Seeni said. Her team will be looking at the data from several different angles, such as whether or not longer interactions are remembered more accurately and whether participants better remember people they see more often. The team will be collecting data from surveys during March and comparing it with the data sets received from the motes.
The final student research team will confirm the findings of Salathé’s previous project, “namely, to support the map of flu transmission he’d created using motes with actual evidence,” said lead investigator Victoria Lin. Participants have the option of volunteering to have their nasal areas and throats swabbed if they report a temperature of 100 or higher. These samples are sent to researchers at Stanford and the University of Pittsburgh for genome sequencing. This will confirm if the same flu virus is spreading or if a new one has been introduced. “We’re also assessing the accuracy of tests known as rapid diagnostics tests, which can give a positive or negative for presence of the flu within 10 minutes, often less,” Lin said.
Dr. Vicki Barclay, one of the Penn State researchers, was glad to see so many students wearing motes. “It’s good to see that we have so many people participating again,” she said.
Lin, meanwhile, was glad her team was able to gather enough interest in being swabbed. “People have been more receptive than I’d anticipated, given that there’s something of a gross factor with the swabbing,” she said. “We have more than 100 volunteers, which is definitely more than I’d expected, and [student council] and the project team have been great about helping pique interest in the project.”
This story was originally published in the Spring 2012 issue of Harker Quarterly
While pushing my son on a swing the other day I noticed that he did not know how to swing himself. It is one thing when your son needs help getting on the swing – some are pretty high – but it’s another when he needs you, once he is on the swing, to get going at all. I began talking him through how to swing himself when I noticed another thing: explaining to a child how to swing himself is not easy. What do you say? It is sort of like explaining how to tie your shoes. Where do you begin? To swing, you have to lean back, pull with your arms, project your legs into the air. By the end my son looked like a piece of dough.
I then realized a third thing (it was a day full of epiphanies). I had never been taught how to swing – I had just learned on my own. I am not even sure how or when I learned. I then began thinking about all of the skills I had learned on my own through playing with kids in the neighborhood. Swimming. Throwing and hitting a ball, any kind of ball. Riding a bike, skateboarding, ice skating. Even bowling. And we didn’t just learn these skills, but we internalized the rules of the games as well. We knew enough to argue ferociously about right and wrong.
As I thought about it, my friends and I learned all of these skills organically, without a single lesson, parent or adult to help. If we hadn’t learned these skills we would have been excluded from a load of play and none of us wanted that. My boys, on the other hand, will learn none of these skills without me or some structured program. In other words, they will require the direct intervention of adults to learn these skills. Most of the children I grew up with simply did not take private lessons of any sort. Today, almost all children take some kind of private lesson or are in some structured activity.
I am not judging the present or recalling the good old days of the past. In fact, there was nothing special about our learning these skills ourselves. We learned these skills like we learned how to walk and talk – naturally. There was actually no way we could not learn them. However, my sons most likely will not learn them without my direct intervention. Why the change? What does it mean, if anything, that some children are growing up in a community where learning skills like these will not happen naturally, without direct instruction? If this is a symptom, what is the disease?
After all, learning these kinds of physical skills organically, through neighborhood play, implies a whole set of conditions that support organic learning the way that rich soil supports plant growth. As for conditions, the neighborhood needs mixed age groups among its children so that the older kids pull up the younger ones. There needs to be extended family, like cousins, aunts, uncles. The kids need to have large amounts of unbroken, unsupervised time for play. They need a common set of goals, meaning that most of them have to find playing baseball or riding bikes fun. There needs to be a loose, mutual understanding between parents, almost like unspoken radar. The children need a neighborhood structure that supports them finding each other in these informal, unstructured, but safe environments. They need, well, a neighborhood.
I am not saying that neighborhoods with playing children do not exist today. They even have a name for them – “playborhoods.” There is a website called playborhood.com that is dedicated to promoting free, unstructured play in neighborhoods precisely because it is difficult to find. However, the facts that a website exists to promote free play and that neighborhoods with open play have a special name tell us something. As Kenneth Jackson says in “Crabgrass Frontier,” a history of American suburbs, “There are few places as desolate and lonely as a suburban street on a hot afternoon.”
What do children learn in unsupervised neighborhood play? They learn socialization, to use a common buzzword today. I am pretty sure my aunts and uncles never used that word. The kids were just doing what they were supposed to do, which was play. They also learn what we now term 21st-century skills, like collaboration, communication and creativity, though none of my friends ever used or even understood those terms. We had to collaborate, communicate and create, otherwise we wouldn’t have any fun.
I did teach my son to pull up and swing himself that day. I still think he prefers to have me push him, but at least he can now swing himself independently. I watch my son among the other kids, followed around by their parents who are instructing, encouraging and preparing them for an uncertain future, arming them with all of the skills they can possibly absorb during their fleeting childhoods. When I see him across the playground, pulling himself up on the swing, flanked by children he doesn’t know, looking across at me smiling with pride, I become a little wistful for the days when children learned these things on their own.
In January, upper school students from grades 10, 11 and 12 toured the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank to build on their classroom study of monetary policy. During their visit, they saw the vault and watched the process of cash being sorted, counted and prepared for transport. The students’ guide taught them about the function of the Federal Reserve, and the students also got to take part in a personal finance seminar.
Rising seniors Anuj Sharma and Aneesh Chona were crowned national champions in public forum debate at the National Forensic League’s National Tournament on June 15. Recent graduates Akshay Jagadeesh and Aakash Jagadeesh (no relation) reached the top 30. The tournament featured more than 260 teams, and thousands of students across the country competed just to qualify for the tournament.
Harker also won a School of Excellence Award in the Debate category. These awards are given to schools with multiple successful teams.
Rising seniors Anuj Sharma and Aneesh Chona were crowned national champions in public forum debate at the National Forensic League’s National Tournament on June 15. Recent graduates Akshay Jagadeesh and Aakash Jagadeesh (no relation) reached the top 30. The tournament featured more than 260 teams, and thousands of students across the country competed just to qualify for the tournament.
Harker also won a School of Excellence Award in the Debate category. These awards are given to schools with multiple successful teams.
Rising seniors Anuj Sharma and Aneesh Chona were crowned national champions in public forum debate at the National Forensic League’s National Tournament on June 15. Recent graduates Akshay Jagadeesh and Aakash Jagadeesh (no relation) reached the top 30. The tournament featured more than 260 teams, and thousands of students across the country competed just to qualify for the tournament.
Harker also won a School of Excellence Award in the Debate category. These awards are given to schools with multiple successful teams.
Harker Future Problem Solving (FPS) teams, middle and upper school, took home multiple championships at the international finals (11 countries, 40 states) held in Indiana in June. Chris Nikoloff, head of school, said it all in a word: “Outstanding.” A complete listing of awards is at the end of the article, but Cyrus Merrill, FPS coach, tells the story below.
By Cyrus Merrill
Our amazing success is a direct result of the legacy of so many talented FPSers who have been part of our program, which is now a little more than a decade old and which has now earned over 10 world championships.
The topic at the international finals was pharmaceuticals and the scenario this year involved challenges and complications surrounding international regulatory acceptance of a new personalized (to your own DNA) medical pill being produced in Brazil.
Harker is now one of the single most successful programs around the world. For the first time ever Harker finished in first place in more than one age division and category. Harker was in the prestigious top 10 in the written booklet competition – in boththe middle and senior divisions.
We finished fourth in the middle team division and we were the overall champions in the incredibly tough and competitive senior/high school team booklet division. We also returned to our strong, proud tradition of being the presentation of action plan (skit) international champion (middle division) for the sixth time in the past seven years.
There is a link below to watch these amazing eighth and ninth graders in their final skit, which they were asked to reprise in front of thousands of people at the awards ceremony. Multiple coaches from several countries all came up to me and asked, “When is California (implying Harker) presenting its action plan skit?” because we have become so well known for our success in that area.
It is a big deal to be in the top 10 in any portion of the competition and we finished with six teams or individuals in the top five and two overall team championships – not bad, especially when you consider that this was out of six categories total.
Finally, I am also especially proud that two of the international finalists in the junior division were from other California schools where our own Harker students had helped to mentor and train those very student competitors and their coach this year.
We are now the only school (and state or foreign country for that matter) to have been awarded a first place in more than one age group and in all of the categories of problem solving: 2012 – team and Plan of Action (several years); 2011 – Alternates (also in 2008 as part of an international group of students from different countries); 2009 – Individual.
The only problem solving category we have not had an overall champion in remains the adult and coaches division, however, I joked with the kids that I promise to eventually pull my own weight, having finished third this year and second several years ago.
I could not be more proud of our wonderful young students than I am at this moment. I want to thank all of them for their amazing efforts and late nights spent reviewing and brainstorming about the topics this year. I want to thank all of the parents for their support of the program as well.
I look forward to next year, when Harker will host the state bowl in April, and to continuing our remarkable success in an amazing program where kids have to work to research topics and analyze future crises all on their own. I love the FPS process and its motto, “Teaching kids how to think, not what to think,” but I would personally add “and then getting out of the way to let them do it on their own.”
RESULTS:
First Places:
International champions, beating out powerhouse teams from New Zealand, Great Britain (actually coached by a former coach at the Nueva School in California ) and Singapore! Remember, Kentucky teams go to FPS camp in the summer for several weeks and meet daily to prepare for the competition, and FPS is a statewide program in Texas and in several other states. Some schools spend more than 10 hours a week working on just FPS! Harker students, on the other hand, completed their school finals and then hopped on a plane the very next day so we were certainly at an apparent “disadvantage” with regard to our ability to prepare for or focus on the international finals topic.
Senior division – booklet competition: rising seniors Ria Desai, Sonia Gupta, Pooja Shah; rising junior Nikhil Dilip.
Middle division – presentation of action plan: rising sophomores Tiara Bhatacharya, Juhi Muthal, Madhu Nori, Sindhu Ravuri, Ankita Pannu, and rising freshman Michael Zhao. An amazing video of this group’s skit/action plan presentation is available. Go to 28:54 to listen to their action plan and 30:40-35:37 to watch their amazing skit being performed in front of nearly 3,000 people in the theater and a live Web audience as well. They wrote this skit and designed it in a mere couple of hours.
Second Place:
Senior division – alternate competition joining competitors from other countries to form a team – Andy Wang, rising junior
Third Place:
Adult division – booklet competition (Cyrus Merrill)
Fifth Place:
Senior division – scenario writing (first ever top five placement by someone from California). Shelby Rorabaugh, rising senior. Because of her finish she is now a published writer as the top five are published and sold.
We also had a second middle division team of rising eighth graders Evani Radiya-Dixit, Sneha Bhetanabhotla, Angela Kim, Priyanka Taneja, Swetha Tummala and Neymika Jain, who finished tied for second place in the preliminary round (and the top two teams out of 11 from each preliminary round advance). They lost out in essentially a coin flip/tie breaker or they would have been finalists as seventh graders in a division ranging from grades 7-9, so the future of our program looks good, too! Our one other international competitor was rising senior Joy Li who missed out on a top three position this year, but was “merely” the first place alternate champion last year as a sophomore.
One of the last upper school vocal performances of the year took place in early May, with Downbeat and Bel Canto coming together for the Songs Into Summer concert at the Nichols Hall auditorium. Bel Canto, directed by Jennifer Cowgill, started things off with a rendition of “Gloria in D Major” by Antonio Vivaldi. Downbeat, musical directed by Catherine Snider and choreographed by Laura Lang-Ree, followed with “I’ve Got the Music in Me.”
Bel Canto entertained with some time-honored classics and traditionals, such as “Guide My Wayfaring Feet,” “Old Dan Tucker” and Harry Warren and Al Dubin’s “Lullaby of Broadway.” Downbeat tackled some of the more popular and challenging songs, including “September” by Earth, Wind and Fire and the U2 megahit “Beautiful Day.”
For the show’s finale, the group performed their version of the Queen classic “Somebody to Love,” and finished with the group’s traditional closer, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
Upper and middle school baseball players and coaches took a group trip to Oakland on Monday to watch the A’s trounce the Angels 2-1. The evening bonding trip was sponsored by Kari Wolff, mother of Drew Goldstein, grade 11, and Arthur Goldstein, grade 8. The group was lucky enough to enjoy the game in a luxury suite, owned by Lew Wolff (Kari Wolff’s father). Harker athletics organizes crossover get-togethers like these specifically to foster a sense of connectivity between the upper school and middle school teams, in conjunction with an overall program goal to connect campuses across all sports. Here’s to many more bonding trips in the near future!
From Stanford to Harvard, there is a lot of new activity in the world of online education and digital resources, and Harker is joining in as a member of the Global Online Academy (GOA). Started in the 2010-11 school year by schools including Lakeside (Seattle), Catlin Gabel (Portland), Kings Academy (near Amman, Jordan), Head-Royce (Oakland), Punahou (Honolulu), Sidwell Friends (Washington, D.C.) and Dalton (New York), GOA is operated by a consortium of member independent schools.
Courses are taught by faculty of member schools exclusively to students of member schools. A teacher at Dalton might have a mix of students from Jordan, Seattle and Honolulu. Each student’s course and grade appear on his or her transcript from the home school and no more than three students from any one school may participate in any one course.
Harker has a long history of effective use of digital resources to support our teaching and learning including being the first high school to have a “Bring Your Own Laptop” program, but approached online learning initiatives carefully. GOA meets Harker’s standards of excellence and the upper school will pilot the program for the 2012-13 academic year.