Harker rising sophomore Rupert Chen recently created a website, called covid9teen, that lets teenagers from around the world share their stories and perspectives on life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chen hopes to document the experience of teenagers, as he feels that too much media coverage has focused on the perspective of adults. The site features an interactive map that users can click on to see the stories that have been shared. “The idea for the website came to me as I read the news about the pandemic,” he said. “That news was, not surprisingly, largely focused on the experiences of adults and how they were coping during this crisis. Even when stories focused on the experiences of teenagers, they were filtered through the eyes of adults.”
Since launching the website, Chen has received submissions from many countries, including Venezuela, Kenya, Italy, Russia, Singapore and New Zealand. “I have found that many teens quarantined at home have been eager to share their perspectives,” he said. His work also led to a collaboration with Stanford University’s Life in Quarantine project. “As the archive grows, I’m hopeful that it will play some role, however small, in writing the history of the pandemic,” Chen noted.
During the spring semester, John Owens MS ‘85, circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, made special appearances at Harker classes via Zoom. In May, Owens gave a presentation of the Ninth Circuit’s history and geographic boundaries to lower school history teacher Eric Leonard’s grade 3 students. Much of the class time was set aside for the students to ask questions, but due to time constraints, Owens agreed to answer questions that students posted online.
In April, he visited Carol Green’s AP U.S. Government and Politics class to discuss his background, including his career in law, his duties as a circuit judge and memories of his time at Harker. He also answered questions from Harker students on topics such as memorable cases he has presided over and advice for soon-to-be-graduates.
As the 2019-20 school year drew to a close, the upper school orchestra and jazz band recorded special performances dedicated to the Class of 2020. Student musicians rigorously practiced their parts and recorded them individually, and music coach Paul Woodruff, an engineer, edited the submitted individual parts to create the final product.
“I can not tell you how lucky and thankful we are for the support of this project from the beginning,” said upper school instrumental music teacher Dave Hart. “As we worked to create an online curriculum for the kids in all the instrumental groups, it really became clear that we all yearned for collaboration that orchestra and jazz band provides on a daily basis when we rehearse in person.”
The orchestra performed an original piece composed and conducted by sophomore Spencer Cha, which features all of the 31 seniors in the orchestra. The jazz band recorded Charlie Parker’s “Bloomdido” and the standard “Misty” by Erroll Garner.
Hart gave special recognition to Woodruff, whose expertise made the project possible. “Paul was able to bring our vision to reality, which was no small undertaking!” Hart exclaimed. “I also want to highlight Spencer’s hours of work to create such a thoughtful and musical composition that features all the seniors. He started working on this last summer and worked on edits with me and other teachers throughout the school year.“
Videos of the performances are embedded below and can also be viewed at Harker’s Vimeo page.
Over the weekend, the upper school’s Science Bowl team competed in the national championship of the US DOE Science Bowl, in which 64 teams from across the country participated. Harker reached the top 16 in the event — held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic — narrowly missing the top 8 after a toss-up question and a bonus answer. William Zhao also participated in a national math contest and as such was unable to compete in the final two rounds of the Science Bowl.
Feb. 12, 2020:
On Saturday, a team of Harker students won the U.S. Department of Energy’s Regional Science Bowl, held at Stanford University’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. It was Harker’s third victory in four years. The team – made up of sophomores David Dai, Harsh Deep, Rishab Parthasarathy and William Zhao and senior Emily Liu – went undefeated the entire day, at one point rallying back from an 18 to 72 deficit in a match against Saratoga High to win 118 to 76. Upper school chemistry teacher Robbie Korin called it the “most impressive comeback I have seen since I started doing this in 1991.” The team will go on to represent the Bay Area in April at the national championship in Washington, D.C.
Another team of Harker students – freshmen Rohan Bhowmik and Nicholas Wei, juniors Michael Eng and Russell Yang and senior Kyle Li – also performed well, reaching the elimination round before tying for seventh place over all out of 28 teams.
Students in Susan Nace’s Study of Music class composed original pieces during the shelter-in-place as part of their studies. These pieces were later recorded using a variety of methods and posted online for analysis. Students also commented on their pieces, detailing their inspirations, processes and the tools they used to create their music.
“I enjoyed working on my composition once I got an idea to go off of,” said Kyra Hawk, grade 9, whose piece was written for her father and brother, both French horn players. “I was impressed by what I could compose, because I never thought of myself a composer of any sort.”
Freshman Anthony Zhao found that working from home afforded him a more flexible schedule, and he used Apple’s GarageBand software to compose his piece. “Some challenges I have faced are learning to compose in a new software and creating effective beat drops,” he said. “When I began, I barely had an idea of how to use GarageBand, but now I am able to compose music in GarageBand.”
For her piece, written for violin and cello, Katelyn Abellera, grade 9, enlisted the help of violinist Sawyer Lai and cellist Abby Tcheng, both grade 9. “First, I came up with the main melody. Then I came the bass part, where I took into consideration harmonies, parallel, similar, contrary and oblique motion that we learned about in theory,” she said.
For those who wish to see and hear these pieces, the students’ works have been uploaded to a public folder accessible by all.
Harker is proud to announce the nine student athletes from the Class of 2020 who have signed commitments to play collegiate sports next year. Ethan Hu committed in the fall to swim at Stanford in the coming year, with the following eight students recently making their decisions public: Katelyn Vo will golf at Pomona College; Jeffrey Kwan will play volleyball at Harvard; Carolyn Lu will play volleyball at Caltech; Cassandra Ruedy will play water polo at Harvey Mudd; Shomrik Mondal will play football at Macalester College; Ashley Jazbec will play volleyball at Bowdoin College; Arushi Madan will play water polo at the University of Toronto; and Emily Cheng will play volleyball at MIT. Congrats to all these amazing athletes! Go Eagles!
Check out all the students along with their “thank yous” here:
Even though he missed out on his senior season, Ethan Hu, grade 12, continues to rack up the accolades. SportsStars Magazine is in the midst of publishing its top 10 athletes in each high school sport from the last decade. When the list of top boys swimmers was released last week, Hu was an obvious choice. Check out Hu’s write up, along with the rest of the top 10:
Earlier this week, upper school students dropped off 640 homemade masks at the Bay Area-based organization LifeMoves, which provides temporary housing and assistance to the local homeless population. The masks are intended to provide much-needed protection to homeless people who are among the most vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic because they cannot socially distance as effectively as those with homes. The upper school’s Medical Club, Key Club and Student Council collaborated on the initiative, which kicked off in late April. Students received directions on how to create the masks, and a special drop-off area was set aside at the upper school campus so that the students could safely deliver the masks without leaving their cars.
A group of Harker upper school students – ninth graders Mir Bahri, Samvita Gautham, Eileen Ma, Dominick Piscione, Jessica Tang, Deeya Viradia and Carol Wininger; and juniors Ethan Choi and Natasha Yen – launched a GoFundMe campaign last month to assist low-income families who are facing greater difficulties during the COVID-19 pandemic due to job loss. The group plans to give a portion of the proceeds to a local family-owned restaurant, so that it can distribute meals to people facing food scarcity as well as small businesses impacted by the pandemic. The remaining funds will be donated to Second Harvest Food Bank, which is struggling to meet the swelling demand of its customers.
In addition, the students also plan to provide online tutoring to area students who cannot attend school due to closures.
Last week, volume 21 of HELM (Harker Eclectic Literature & Media) was released online via Issuu. It is the first issue of the annual student magazine to be published online upon release. This year’s collection of student-created poetry, essays, short stories and visuals deals with the subject of nostalgia and how it is experienced by the current generation of high schoolers. “We’re often left out of the conversation about generation differences, as a part of the in-between: too young to have grown up watching ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ while munching on Hubba Bubba gum, but not young enough to have spent our toddler years hogging the iPad to play with virtual toys,” reads the foreword by editors-in-chief Annie Ma and Amla Rashingkar, both seniors.
The magazine is readable in web browsers and available as a download in PDF format.