Harker’s middle school is putting up six robotics teams this year, five of which entered competitions in the last few weeks. The teams, ranging from three to five competitors, are coached by middle school teacher Michael Schmidt.
The first two teams to compete placed sixth and seventh out of 24 and one of them received the award for most well-rounded team in addition to an invitation to compete in the second of three rounds. On Nov.14 three additional teams competed, placing fifth, 10th and 12th with overall scores that were even higher than the first group’s. Both the fifth- and 10th-place teams advanced to the next round and the 10th-place team was awarded first place for teamwork.
These students have shown a very high level of commitment given that practices and competitions are on Saturdays. We hope to hear more from these teams as the next round of competitions is Dec. 19 and the championship will be held on Jan 16. Good luck, robotics teams!
[Update] Nov. 20, 2009:
The Harker girls tennis team’s run in the CCS team championships came to an end earlier this week after a great 16-5 season. In singles play, Arthi Padmanabhan, Gr. 12, won her match 6-1, 5-7, 10-8 against Monta Vista. Jenny Chen, Gr. 9, also chalked up a win against Monta Vista with scores of 7-6, 0-6, 10-6. Monta Vista won its next two singles matches over freshman Daria Karakoulka, 6-1, 6-0and sophomore Aranshi Kumar, 6-1, 6-1. In doubles, Harker seniors Kelly Chen and Brittany Chu defeated top seed Monta Vista 7-6, 6-2. Monta Vista was able to clinch a spot in the final four, however, by winning two doubles matches. Padmanabhan and Jenny Chen will compete in the CCS Individual Tennis Championships, held Nov. 23-24, facing Monta Vista. Harker’s top doubles team, Kelly Chen and Brittany Chu will compete against St. Francis. Congratulations to the Harker girls tennis team on a fantastic season!
[Update] For the first time in Harker tennis history, boys or girls, a team has reached the CCS quarterfinal round. The girls narrowly defeated eighth seeded Menlo-Atherton 4-3. Freshmen Daria Karakoulka and Jenny Chen, each won deciding matches, with Chen clinching the final match. The number one doubles tandem of Kelly Chen–Brittany Chu and number three doubles team, senior Vivian Huang and frosh partner, Chau Nguyen, contributed as well. Number two doubles lost a close match–a sudden death tiebreaker — in the third set. Number one singles, senior Arthi Padmanabhan and number four singles, Aranshi Kumar, Gr.10, lost well-fought matches. The team now faces number one seed Monta Vista Friday, Nov. 13, 2:30 at Monta Vista.
Nov. 6, 2009:
Harker’s girls tennis doubles teams faced off for first and second at the WBAL tournament at Menlo School. In the championship match Jenny Chen, Gr. 9 and Arthi Padmanabhan, Gr. 12, teamed up to defeat seniors Kelly Chen and Brittany Chu 6-4, 6-4. Kelly Chen and Chu were seeded second and they defeated Sacred Heart Prep to get into the championship match. Jenny Chen and Padmanabhan were unseeded and defeated first-seeded Menlo 6-3, 6-0 in the other semifinal. Jenny Chen and Padmanabhan are automatics for the CCS Individual Tournament, Nov. 23-24, and Kelly Chen and Chu will be nominated for an at-large spot and will likely get one, said Dan Molin, athletic director.
Cash has been flowing toward charities supporting vital water projects of late, thanks to some liquid measures promoted by Harker’s Global Empowerment and Outreach (GEO) club.
Selling water bottles, gaining sponsorship for coffee-eschewing teachers, and topping it all off with a group dunking of campus adults, GEO’s diverse efforts generated sums far beyond initial expectations for charity:water, a nonprofit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations. The funds will help dig a pair of wells to provide clean water in places where that crucial commodity has hitherto been inaccessible.
GEO members were inspired by the Harker Speaker Series talk by activist Rick Smolan, who expressed enthusiasm for the lengths to which GEO members took his ideas and ran with them,
“One of the things that disturbed me so much as I worked on The Blue Planet Run book was how little attention the world was paying to something so important to every person on the planet. To be able to positively affect the lives of others at such a young age is something I don’t think any of the Harker students will ever forget and I am thrilled to think my lecture touched your students on such a deep level,” Smolan said. “Please extend my congratulations to all the students involved in this amazing effort.”
GEO’s efforts began in October, when students began raising money by selling water bottles and foot bands: rubber bands that students wore around one of their feet to symbolize the distances people in poor areas must walk to obtain dirty and often contaminated water. Teachers also gave up their favorite drinks for a week, and several students carried around jugs of dirty water to remind others of the reality of those less fortunate. The GEO fall week also included an appearance by charity:water representative Lane Wood and a special relay race among all the upper school grade levels that was won by the class of 2011.
All the deprivation, exertion and solemn remembrance of others’ difficulty gave way to some celebrating after the unexpectedly large fundraising totals were announced at a special meeting on Davis Field Nov. 9. Students were directed to the Singh Aquatic Center, where they were treated to their reward for raising more than $10,000: witnessing several of the school’s faculty and staff leap into the pool, fully clothed. The intrepid squadron of educators gathered at pool’s edge as a youthful chorus counted down “5…..4…..3….2….1!” At the appointed moment, into the drink they leapt, followed by good-natured frolicking. The Wet Ones: history teachers Julie Wheeler, Dan Hudkins, Ramsay Westgate, language instructors John Hawley, Diana Moss, performing arts teacher Jeffrey Draper, computer scientist Fred Triefenbach, college counselor Kevin Lum Lung, journalism teacher Chris Daren as well as alumni director Christina Yan and athletic director Dan Molin.
A bracing dip might have been just the ticket for another set of educators participating in the water-improvement campaign. Many of those who gave up or cut back on their favorite beverages ended up reducing their caffeine intake. The abstainers included science teachers Matthew Harley, Mala Raghavan, Eric Nelson and Gary Blickenstaff; math teachers Rama Sethia, Tony Silk and Jeannette Fernandez; history teachers Ramsay Westgate, Carol Zink, Julie Wheeler, Dan Hudkins, Donna Gilbert and Nicole Jensen; foreign language teachers Shawn Jahshan and Nicholas Manjoine; Naomi Schatz (psychology), Adam Nelson (debate), Jeff Draper (theater), Susan King (computer science) and Greg Lawson, the assistant head of school for student affairs .
After the week, participating teachers reported the challenge had been refreshing and less daunting than expected. Blickenstaff, well known for his dependence on a cup of joe during lectures, claimed that the prospect of living on half of his coffee dose was tolerable, and that he would give it up again if necessary. Raghavan even called the coffee cutback “fun”, declaring, “I was happy to have made it with just one cup a day for the whole week. I actually slept better.”
Together with the Lug-a-Jug fundraiser, Cups-for-a-Well donations and merchandise sales, the GEO-led effort brought in $10,918, allowing for a contribution of $10,118 after deductions to cover costs. Prospective users of the wells were not alone in benefiting from the project. Said GEO secretary Rashmi Sharma Gr. 12: “Pursuing outreach through GEO has helped me foster my passion about learning about international issues and how I can help solve them by empowering others.”
Nov. 11, 2009
The 2009 Xbox 360® Get Up Tour came to the Saratoga campus today to publicize Nov. 11 as Tobacco Free Kids Day. The rolling show set up in the Manzanita parking lot and fired up at 11:15, running for about an hour. While an emcee talked about the dangers of tobacco use, some of the best BMX riders, skateboarders and inline skaters in the world defied gravity, seemingly effortlessly travelling up, down, backwards and sideway on a portable half pipe to entertain students. In an added Veterans’ Day bonus, a pair of Marines arrived in a bright red Humvee to educate about the Marines and challenge students to do pushups in return for tee shirts (Pain is Just Weakness Leaving the Body) and water bottles. The show, sponsored in part by the Marines, presented by ASA Entertainment and the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, is touring the Bay Area this week.
“This is not your typical anti-tobacco presentation,” said Courtney Dornstein, coordinator for ASA Entertainment. “We bring in a state-of-the-art half-pipe, along with five of the top, pro action sports athletes in skateboarding, BMX and inline skating to perform a show. While these stars, some of whom are X Games medalists and all are top names in their disciplines, are performing their tricks and such, a highly knowledgeable emcee delivers the anti-tobacco facts and messages in a fun, engaging, positive and interactive fashion.”
Cantilena, the all-female upper school classical vocal group, recently performed at the Women’s Exchange Festival, organized by the Peninsula Women’s Chorus. The event also featured groups from other high schools, including Leigh, Cupertino, Los Altos, Mountain View, Prospect and Saratoga.
The girls received several warm compliments from the attendees of the festival. “Cantilena was the smallest ensemble at the festival but they received a rousing ovation (rather than polite applause) and several compliments for ‘being the best,’ ‘looking like they loved singing,’ ‘communicating effectively with the audience,’” said the group’s director, Susan Nace. “Several even knocked on the bus door to talk our bus driver, Ray Frank, to tell him that they appreciated the performance, even before we got to the bus ourselves!”
Harker Forensics has continued to do well at competitions across the country. At the Blue Key tournament in Florida, held Oct. 30 through Nov. 1, Michael Tsai, Gr. 11, earned his second Congressional Debate bid after making it to the semifinal round, fully qualifying him to the Congress Tournament of Champions. Meanwhile, sophomores Rohan Bopardikar and Daryl Neubieser made it to round of eight at the Manchester-Essex tournament in Massachusetts that same weekend, thus earning their first bid to the Public Forum Tournament of Champions.
Earlier in October, Kristi Lui and Tyler Koteskey, both Gr. 11, reached the top 21 in the public forum debate category at the Big Bronx Invitational in New York City.
At the New Trier tournament, held in the greater Chicago area, seniors Adam Perelman and Arjun Mody made it to the semifinal round (round of four) and earned a bid to the policy debate Tournament of Champions.
Harker sent a strong contingent to the YWCA of Silicon Valley’s 19th annual luncheon at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in mid-October. Students Guadalupe Briseno and Melinda Wang, both Gr. 12, Shannon O’Reilly, Gr.11, and Michelle Lo, Gr. 10, represented Harker, accompanied by Pam Dickinson, director of the Office of Communication, and her assistant, Theresa Halol.
The keynote speaker was actress Sonia Manzano, who played Maria on “Sesame Street” for many years. Manzano said when she started on the show she didn’t realize the how great its scope and positive impact were, or that during her whole career she would be upstaged by a bunch of Muppets. Manzano has won 15 Emmy Awards for her “Sesame Street” scripts, and has returned to the stage in New York in “The Vagina Monologues” and “The Exonerated.”
The event is the largest fundraiser for the YWCA of Silicon Valley. Along with Harker, over 40 companies and individuals sponsor the annual luncheon. The annual funds are used to support the organization’s community programs and services that serve more than 24,000 women and families annually.
Freshmen honors history students stepped into the past in a recent class, performing skits on the ancient rivalry between Athens and Sparta. Students created a commercial for their respective city-state proving which one was best to live in, and why. Creativity was blended with rhetoric and gastronomy: students made their own costumes, militaristic Spartans fought and artistic Athenians devoured grapes and quaffed “wine.”
[Updated] A film crew from UNICEF was on campus Oct. 26 to film Harker’s various green installations, including Smart Meters at the lower school, and to interview Shreya Indukuri and Daniela Lapidous, both Gr. 10, about the grant they received (see below). The film will be used as the U.S. portion of a documentary by UNICEF on youth activism in global climate change.
The students had attended the Governors’ Global Climate Summit co-hosted by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sept. 30-Oct. 2 in Los Angeles, as two of 25 climate youth leaders.
Earlier this year, the girls were awarded an environmental grant of $5,500 to improve Harker’s energy efficiency, implement an organic garden and install window-insulating film at the upper school campus. Indukuri’s father, Raju, is a co-founder, with Alexis Ringwald, of Valence Energy, which makes efficiency measuring equipment. Ringwald has been advising and mentoring the girls throughout their project. Harker has had smart meters, devices for monitoring energy use, installed at the lower school campus, and plans to use the grant money to install smart meters at the upper school, along with several other energy saving measures.
At the conference, Lapidous and Indukuri, traveling with Ringwald and Butch Keller, upper school head, met politicians and activists. They were joined by upper school math teacher Mary Mortlock and Winged Post reporter Shannon O’Reilly, Gr. 11,on Friday. The governors’ conference precedes a global climate conference in Copenhagen, which includes the Children’s Climate Forum (CCF), a UNICEF-sponsored event. Harker’s Olivia Zhu, Gr.11, is one of only four students in the U.S. selected to attend the CCF in Copenhagen.
Keynote speeches in L.A. were delivered by Tony Blair, Thomas Friedman and Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Indukuri and Lapidous’ project was on display at the conference in the Valence booth, and the young women presented to a variety of visitors, including Governor Schwarzenegger.
The students answered some questions on their experiences at the conference:
1. What was the highlight of the trip for you? Indukuri: The highlight of my trip was watching Tom Friedman speak about climate change. He is an amazing, motivational and engaging speaker who inspired the entire audience to take a stand and go green by persuading climate leaders in the government to pass new laws. I’ll always remember his hilarious yet precise advice – “Get out of Facebook and get in someone’s face!”
Lapidous: The highlight of the trip for me was the closing luncheon where Tony Blair, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri and Schwarzenegger had an on-stage conversation with Ann Thompson. All of them are great leaders on climate change who have the ability to put forth the information and a call to action in a way that can relate to and inspire the average person.
2. What did you learn that will help you with your project at Harker? Indukuri: I learned that with a little personal effort from every member of the student body and faculty, there can be huge reduction in carbon emissions at Harker.
Lapidous: A lot of persistence will be needed to make any change. The most useful thing was meeting people with experience in a lot of areas of environmentalism – business people, scientists, school leaders, politicians – and getting their contact information and support. We’ve been e-mailing some of them and joining a couple of online networks that will help us stay connected to the global green movement and get resources for our Harker project.
3. Who did you meet that made an impression on you? Indukuri: The youth panel and Tom Friedman definitely made a huge impression on me. One of the panelists mentioned that the majority of people genuinely care about the environment, but since we Californians don’t deal with climate change as directly as island nations do, the issue doesn’t hit us as hard. If there was a way to show everyone that every single person around them will be affected severely by climate change if no change is taken, that will hopefully stimulate a huge interest and commitment to fighting climate change.
Lapidous: Meeting Tom Friedman for a second at a party was a complete awe-of-celebrity moment, but then hearing him speak at an event was incredible. He talked about how the price of oil is inverse to the pace of freedom, and how fighting climate change is not something that will compete with the economy – clean tech will become the driving force of the economy. I was personally impressed with Schwarzenegger’s speaking style, and we met him for about five minutes when we were presenting the Harker energy plan at the Valence Energy booth. My favorite quote of his was that we need to make green hip, like what “Saturday Night Fever” did for disco. Beth Stevens, from Disney, was really nice, too. We explained the smart energy plan to her, and she said smart energy would be an interesting idea for their Disney environmental schools projects. We also met Pam Tuttle from California Student Sustainability Coalition and some of her friends from the same organization and talked with them at an evening reception for a while about everything from GM food to green colleges. They said they’d like to reach out to high schools more. That conversation just made an impression on us because we thought the CSSC was really cool.
Did the conference fire you up even more on the topic? Indukuri: I feel a million times more committed to joining the green movement because, with this tremendous support and passion brewing among global leaders, there are endless possibilities to fighting climate change. I also feel more committed to informing people that climate change exists and it has disastrous consequences; a lot of the climate leaders stated that a huge fraction of the world’s population is unaware of climate change issues.
Lapidous: Definitely! Right after I got back from the conference, I really started thinking about the impacts of all my actions from turning off lights to how long I showered – more obsessively than usual! And we were extremely inspired. All of these brilliant people converging in one place to discuss this one topic just shows how important it is; if we don’t anything about it now, we’ll really regret it in the future and history will label us as the generation who sat back and watched the world go up in flames. People will either be part of the problem or part of the solution, and it will take an extremely grueling period of effort by a lot of people to come up with even a fraction of a solution, but every contribution counts. We know the work is hard, and it does seem rather intimidating, but we’re just taking it one baby step at a time.
Do you have any other comments on the overall experience? Indukuri: One of my favorite parts of the conference was the youth leaders’ optimistic approach to combating climate change. Since young generations helped create massive movements such as civil rights, women’s rights, etc., climate change is this generation’s challenge and we should be excited and committed to solving it!
Lapidous: Sure, we’re inspired, but we really need the help of other people, too! I understand that in the U.S., especially, it’s hard to recognize the effects of climate change, and look so far into the future when we have problems in the present. However, it needs to be seen that climate change is THE number one issue facing the planet. We’re going to constitute the future – I think we need to all come together to make sure that our future thoughts are, “We’re glad we didn’t miss the chance to take action.”