Students are once again being treated to Waffle Wednesday this year, a weekly event started by Samuel “Butch” Keller, upper school head, in 2007. Keller started Waffle Wednesday during his first month at Harker to give himself the opportunity to get to know the students. “It was evident to me, because this was the first time in my career that I was not teaching and/or coaching, that there was a disconnect,” Keller said. “After all, I started this profession to be able to interact and have an impact on students.”
Keller usually invites a certain group to each Waffle Wednesday, be it a student club, a sports team, an advisory group, or a randomly selected batch of four students, who are asked to bring friends. So far this year, Keller has met with several groups, including the journalism team that published the early edition of the Winged Post and the boys volleyball and football teams, as well as an advisory group.
“There is never an agenda, so I hope the students come in relaxed and ready to eat a hot breakfast of fresh muffins, waffles, fruit, bacon and eggs,” Keller said.
In September and October, freshmen performing arts apprentices attended a series of required workshops intended to help them get to know one another and familiarize them with technical and behavioral standards expected of students in the Harker Conservatory’s certificate program.
At the first workshop, students introduced themselves to each other and talked about their chosen disciplines. The students also learned about every aspect of the Conservatory’s certificate program, “so that they fully know what to expect during their four years,” said Laura Lang-Ree, K-12 performing arts chair. Students then broke up into four groups and rotated through workshops in dance, singing, acting and instrumental music, with each group led by a Conservatory advisor.
The second workshop taught the students various technical aspects they will be required to learn, such as being part of a support crew, running spotlights and moving and building sets. At the final workshop, called the etiquette workshop, apprentices were shown the standards of good behavior onstage, backstage and in the audience.
Seniors claimed the title as winners Oct. 6 when they beat the class of 2013 and then the faculty in the final dodgeball matches of this year’s upper school tournament. A week prior, juniors defeated the freshmen, placing them in third. Each class will receive points in hopes of winning the spirit award at the end of the year.
On a weekend in late September, Jeffrey Draper, upper school drama teacher, along with upper school English teachers Jason Berry and Pauline Paskali, traveled with a group of 21 students to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the country’s largest regional repertory theater. Draper said the trip gave the students the opportunity to see “the greatest productions of Shakespeare that can be found on this side of the Atlantic.”
Draper said the highlight of the trip was the production of “Hamlet,” Shakespeare’s epic tale of revenge set in Denmark. “The contemporary setting, innovative staging and stellar acting was something we won’t soon forget,” he said.
Before viewing a play, the group attended prologues to gain a greater understanding of the text and how the theater company was producing each play during the season. Students got to meet actors and attended a special workshop put on by one of the company’s actors and its education director.
“This will certainly be an experience that Harker enjoys every summer,” Draper said. Space for the fall 2011 trip will be limited, he added, “and I’d recommend that anyone interested in attending reserve their spots as soon as the trip is announced in the spring.”
In June, a paper co-authored by James Seifert, grade 12, was accepted to the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie. Recognized as the top chemistry journal, Angewandte Chemie accepts fewer than five percent of the papers that are submitted for publication.
The study, titled “Amphiphilic Self-Assembly of an n-Type Nanotube,” which was completed while Seifert worked in the chemistry department at Ohio State University, has been published online (purchase required) and will appear as a cover story in the November hard copy edition of the journal. For the project, Seifert worked with graduate student Hui Shao in preparing compounds that were used to conduct the research. “The work in the paper actually involves three research groups from two universities,” said Dr. Jon Parquette, professor of chemistry at Ohio State. “However, Hui and James made the initial discoveries that were further investigated by these groups.”
Recently, the article was featured by the online chemistry magazine ChemViews.
This story was originally published in the Fall 2010 issue of Harker Quarterly Harker junior Margaret Krackeler signed up to get a course out of the way and found she liked it.
“The teachers are really fun and I’m there with my friends,” she said during the final week. As a bonus, she was able to enter AP Biology this fall, skipping the otherwise-required year of Honors Biology.
Chris Florio, Summer Institute principal, said that most students enroll in the Institute as a result of academic planning: either to knock off a required course or to get ahead in a subject area of interest. Many classes are in core subjects, but enrichment courses are also offered in art, forensics and even driver’s education.
Honors Geometry teacher Misael Fisico revealed how he captures students’ attention as they face the prospect of fourplus hours of geometry daily. “I know my students are into computers,” he said, “so there are always computer activities in my class, especially for the first two weeks. Then, I let them do the thinking once I’ve bombarded them with the fun stuff!”
Computer science teacher Susan King noted that, while many students take programming to complete academic requirements, “it isn’t all that rare for kids to find out they like it and go on to take the AP course as a result.” Like Fisico, King works hard to make her instruction and classwork relevant and fun.
“I try not to be the sage on the stage,” she said, “but to have the kids be very active – not only programming on their computers, but also writing on the white boards and working in teams of two.”
It’s not all fun and games for sure, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any: King and her teaching assistant, Partha Vora, grade 11, put on a version of “The Dating Game” in the Advanced Programming class to illustrate the operation of data structures.
Data structures can represent many, many data points, explained King, “or just three pieces of information, like Bachelors One, Two and Three.” In the game, “the bachelorette could question the bachelors but she had to use the correct index,” she said. “If she rejected one, she removed that bachelor from the database, using all the appropriate concepts.”
Prag Batra, grade 11, got to the crux of the matter: “It’s kind of frustrating when it’s not working, and you have to spend all this time debugging. But thinking of the idea and trying to come up with the logic is kind of fun,” he said.
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 Advanced Placement National Scholar awards have been announced and Harker students earned 366 awards in one category or another. Categories range from the AP international diploma, a globally recognized program for students who display exceptional achievement on AP exams across several disciplines, to the AP scholar award for students who receive scores of 3 or higher on three or more AP Exams. Students can qualify for more than one category.
Harker students garnered awards in a several categories. The school has 62 students in the scholar category; 50 students were named scholars with honor for receiving an average score of at least 3.25 on all AP exams takenand scores of 3 or higher on four or more of these exams; 183 students were named scholars with distinction for receiving an average score of at least 3.5 on all AP exams taken and scores of 3 or higher on five or more of these exams; and 71 students were named national scholars (United States) who received an average score of at least 4 on all AP exams taken and scores of 4 or higher on eight or more of these exams. Hearty congratulations to all!
As fall sports ramp up teams are building skills and garnering wins!
Volleyball
Varsity volleyball continued their undefeated season with wins over Del Mar, Saratoga and Leigh high schools, making them 7-0. All three victories were achieved in three sets in a best of five series, illustrating the Eagles’ dominance on the court. The girls face Silver Creek at home this Friday and will attend the Cupertino classic this weekend.
Junior varsity also posted three wins last week, improving their record to 10-2 on the season, and spent a weekend honing skills at a Spikefest tourney.
The freshmen team had their first game ever last week against Sacred Heart. Though the game ended in defeat, the girls put on an impressive show. The girls have been working hard all season; look for them to improve as the year progresses.
Football
Football continued their winning streak last week, now 3-0, with a 36-20 victory over Soledad last Friday. Quarterback Rishi Bhatia, grade 12, passed for over 200 yards and four touchdowns including two to Gautam Krishnamurthi, grade12; one to Daanish Jamal, grade 11; and one to Greg Cox, grade 12. Jamal also scored an additional touchdown on an interception return. Come show your support this Friday as the Eagles face Lynbrook in a contest of undefeated teams.
Cross Country
Last Saturday the team competed in the Chieftain Classic in Salinas. Tyler Yeats, grade 10, ran an impressive 18:26 which earned him 16th place in the boys race. In the girls race, Ragini Bhattacharya, grade 10, finished in 11th place with a time of 21:09. The team will travel to Stanford for their invitational this Saturday.
Girls Tennis
For the second year in a row our girls tennis team placed a strong second behind St. Francis Sacramento at last week’s Santa Catalina Tournament in Monterey. Sophomore Jenny Chen became the third Harker player to win the number one singles flight while Shwetha Bharadwaj, grade 9, won the number two singles. Sophomores Daria Karakoulka and Chau Nguyen in addition to Jaya Chandra, grade 11 and Sylvie Dobrota, grade 10, almost won their doubles flights, finishing as runners-up.
Harker’s number one doubles team, Tanya Piskun, grade 11 and Katia Mironova, grade 9, made it to the semifinals, and Harker’s number two doubles team, Sahithya Prakash, grade 9 and Aranshi Kumar, grade 11, made it to the second round. The girls have a big week with matches against Presentation, Mitty and Priory, all at Blackford.
Water Polo
Both the boys and girls teams fell to tough Wilcox teams last week. They look to rebound this week with two home games. The boys will face Cupertino and Saratoga, and the girls will face Mountain View and Cupertino.
Golf
The girls golf team opens league play this week with matches against Castilleja and Notre Dame.
On Sept. 20, sophomores took the Leap of Faith, clambered up the Vertical Playpen and twisted their way through the Spider’s Web during the annual sophomore class trip to outdoor adventure sites in La Honda and Santa Cruz.
“The faculty and students were enjoying the activities, the nice weather and spending time with their advisory groups,” class dean Jeff Draper said.
Aimed to encourage leadership, communication and team bonding the trip allowed students to use teamwork to complete various obstacles. “I think the day incorporates teamwork activities as well as the high ropes piece where students take a risk and do something they thought they would never do before,” adviser and upper school counselor Chris Colletti said.
Students in his advisory, while apprehensive at first, gathered the courage to jump off a 70-foot diving board, deemed the Leap of Faith, and traversed a 20-foot wall later in the day. “They did it by helping one another over this barrier!” Colletti said. “What a great metaphor in life that you can do anything with help, support and good guidance.”
Throughout the day, classmates cheered each other on and offered encouraging words as their friends climbed nets and walls and fell from tall platforms. Students climbing the Ninja and Lunge were forced to walk a thin wire and lunge towards a dangling rope. “It required teamwork, handholding and communication,” student Lori Berenberg said.
Later in the day, a looming six-foot net stood before Berenberg and her advisory was given one challenge: everyone had to get through the web without touching the wires that made the net.
“It was probably my proudest moment of sophomore year so far,” Berenberg said. “As I was standing in the middle of a high-five circle with my amazing advisory, I was overwhelmed with joy and love for these supportive people.”
Alice Tsui found the entire trip an amazing experience. “I’d never done anything like it before, and I think just the thrill and possibility of falling made it so much better,” Tsui said.
Like Berenberg and Tsui, Cecilia Lang-Ree and Apurva Tandon felt that the physical and mental challenges of the day strengthened the bond within their advisories.
“We were practically entrusting our advisory and class with our physical safety,” Tandon said. “It was definitely nice just working together and building spirit. It gave us a chance to somewhat shift from the more competitive Harker mentality to a team one, which was pretty special.”