During the spring semester, lower school English teacher Heather Russell got 32 lower school girls involved with the national Girls on the Run program. “I’m a runner and I thought this would be a great thing for girls, [because] many of them don’t think of themselves as runners,” Russell said. “But it’s really a lot more than that, because it’s an incredible curriculum that focuses on self-esteem and positive self-talk and self-image.”
The girls trained together for a 5K run in late May, in which they participated with 5,000 other runners. Each meeting started with a brief classroom activity based on the week’s theme, such as bullying, gossip and qualities that make good friends. Students also learned about healthy life habits and nutrition. The runners then did warm-up exercises and went on practice runs, which integrated various activities, including a scavenger hunt that had students locate scraps of paper that provided tips on how to be a good friend, such as learning how to say something positive about someone else. Parents of Girls on the Run participants were sent summaries of the topics so that they could continue the discussion at home.
“I thought this would be a great way to meet new people, make great friends and grow emotionally,” said Trisha Iyer, grade 5. “It’s a great way to talk about all these topics that everyone has trouble with but never really wants to share.”
Russell noted that even with increased efforts to encourage young girls to enter careers they are interested in, they still often feel insecure, something she hopes to improve with Girls on the Run. “What is exciting for me is just to see them discover the beautiful qualities of themselves,” she said.
This story was originally published in the Summer 2017 edition of Harker Magazine.
Early 20th century French painter Henri Matisse, who left an indelible mark on modern art, once said, “It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power to an inborn talent. In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome. The artist begins with a vision – a creative operation requiring an effort. Creativity takes courage.”
These sentiments are seamlessly woven into the fabric of Harker’s progressive visual arts curricula. “A student’s effort is paramount in grading their progress in whatever course they take with me,” explained Pilar Agüero-Esparza, upper school visual arts teacher, who received the William Hyde and Susan Benteen Irwin Scholarship for proven excellence in the arts during her undergraduate days at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She went on to earn her master’s degree in spatial art from San Jose State University.
“I do not believe that only students who already have an aptitude for the visual arts – either through innate characteristics or due to prior experience with classes – can do well and get A’s,” Agüero-Esparza said. “I believe that anyone can learn to draw by studying the mechanics, learning techniques and, inevitably, practicing. This is where effort and an open attitude to learn is what becoming a great artist is all about.”
At Harker, the visual arts take the form of yearlong required courses, single-semester electives, Advanced Placement and honors classes, after-school activities and summer programs – all of which are designed to foster creativity, self-expression, imagination, critical thinking, problem-solving, confidence, open-mindedness, curiosity, risk-taking and time management.
Through art, students of all ages learn how to view and interpret the world around them – and find out more about themselves along the way. As with academic and extracurricular offerings in acting, dance and choreography, directing, instrumental music, musical theater, technical theater and vocal music, instruction covers not only artmaking but also art history, theory, criticism and appreciation.
Led by K-12 visual arts department chair Jaap Bongers and K-5 assistant chair Gerry-louise Robinson, faculty members on all four campuses include both postgraduate educators and professional artists, specializing in architecture, ceramics, collage, design, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, stone carving and textiles.
Starting With a Blank Canvas
At Harker Preschool, whether inside cozy cottage classrooms or their very own art studio, Harker’s littlest learners precociously begin their individual journey toward self-expression, experimenting with a wide range of media and materials that put their critical thinking and fine motor skills to the test. As they engage in intentional play through a series of handson, developmentally appropriate projects in ceramics, collage, drawing, painting, weaving and wire working, they exhibit curiosity, intrinsic motivation, creative problem-solving, aesthetic valuing, sorting, counting, sequencing and much more.
“The arts foster a deeper understanding of our uniquely human existence,” said preschool visual arts specialist Alexandria Kerekez. “We can process our experiences, reinforce our knowledge, and come to know ourselves by creating and enjoying art. Children learn about the world as it is by making observations, thinking representationally and developing new skills with multiple tools. Most notably, they can come to imagine the world as it can be through open-ended art experiences that allow them to express their feelings and ideas in an environment with no wrong answers.”
At just 3, 4 and 5 years of age, when it comes to their own creations, these tiny artists are given free rein – from ideation to evaluation. Kerekez, who holds a bachelor’s degree in creative arts and a master’s degree in education and social justice, refers to her role as “the guide on the side.”
“It is important to me that the children’s ideas inspire the topics of their research and that they choose the materials for its execution. It is my role to facilitate the activities and suggest helpful techniques and proper usage of their chosen tools. They are the leaders of their own creative destinies,” said Kerekez, who is currently working on a personal project of threedimensional mixed-media sculptures soon to be installed in common areas in and around San Jose. “All student artwork is assessed by the artist who created it. During every visit to the art studio, a reflection time is carved into the schedule. This is a time for the young artists to express their ideas, explain their processes, make aesthetic evaluations and plan for future works,” Kerekez noted.
Exploring the Elements
Kindergartners and first graders, encouragingly guided by Peggy Lao, lower school visual arts teacher, are introduced gradually to the elements of art, including color, form, line, shape, space, texture and value. Before they begin to dabble in ceramics, collage, drawing and printmaking, students watch closely and listen carefully as Lao offers step-by-step demonstrations.
“I like to use a follow-the-leader type of guided teaching with the younger students,” said Lao. “I demonstrate a step, then the students do the step on their own papers. This method is good for time management, and it allows students to process and execute a step at a time, rather than having to accomplish too much in a short time,” she said. “Once they begin to work, students must learn to be flexible as they change their ideas, take the initiative to seek help and guidance, and, above all, strive to be confident with their own personal creativity by not comparing to others.”
Robinson, who leads Harker’s second through fifth grade art classes and previously taught in Australia, her native Ireland and the United Kingdom, adheres to a variety of engaging teaching styles intended for different ages and abilities, including one-on-one instruction and teacher-led direct instruction. She even creates instructional videos that students can view at home, which means more time making art at school. “I also incorporate music, books, magazines, visual aids and, of course, lots of demonstrations,” she added.
Students in Robinson’s classes are exposed to the principles of design – balance, emphasis, harmony, hierarchy, proportion, and similarity and contrast – as they study art movements and periods throughout history, conduct independent research, enjoy gradelevel field trips to local art museums and build 3-D works of art. After-school activities include workshops and open studio time, and Robinson teaches arts and crafts as part of Harker’s summer programming.
Since art is open to aesthetic interpretation, “evaluation is based not on product but on process,” Robinson said. “While we do have a guideline, observing how a student handles each step of a project from beginning to end is where the assessment will derive from.”
For middle schoolers to succeed in Elizabeth Saltos’ visual art classes, where visual learning and bigpicture, right-brain thinking is all the rage. Students must “participate in every lesson and immerse themselves in the experience, take chances, make mistakes, go beyond the predictable visual solutions, and come up with something completely unique from their previous pieces, personally empowering, expressive and connected to themselves,” Saltos said. She is also the middle school’s Art Club faculty advisor.
Saltos’ students practice and develop their conceptual, technical and visual perceptual skills as they create two- and three-dimensional works of art, including drawings, paintings, ceramics and sculpture. They continue to cultivate their own aesthetic and personal imagery, interpret style and theme, and study various artists, art movements, cultures and historical periods. After school, they can let their imaginations run wild with workshops, Art Club and open studio time.
“Visual learners use art directly to analyze, deconstruct and synthesize elements of a problem to reassemble parts of the whole into a new form,” said Saltos, who came to Harker following a quarter-century-long career focused primarily on private and public sculpture commissions, with a master’s degree in industrial arts and education from San Francisco State University. “This research model applies to all areas of life.”
To impart a genuine sense of community and connectedness in her classroom, and to temporarily silence the stress of the day, Saltos leads a simple exercise in mindfulness and centering wherein her sixth, seventh and eighth grade students take turns striking a Tibetan singing bowl with a padded mallet.
“I teach by doing, by listening, by making the classroom more of an art studio and getting out of the institutional setting, by helping the students to relax and sink into ideas and process and not race to conclusions and answers,” Saltos said. “The process is more important than the product. Often, I model making mistakes and then using the mistake as a springboard to create a new visual statement.”
Applying the Principles
In addition to compulsory courses in English, mathematics, science, history and social science, modern and classical languages, computer science and physical education, ninth grade students must fulfill a performing or visual arts requirement via a survey course in visual arts, music, dance or theater arts.
“These courses study contemporary thought and process around each discipline while linking it to historical movements,” explained Joshua Martinez, upper school media arts instructor, who holds a master’s degree in spatial art from California College of the Arts.
“There is also an Advanced Placement Art History course that provides an in-depth study of 19th and 20th century art,” he said. “The mechanics of art are taught in each discipline-specific elective course. The idea that art tells the narrative of its maker, that all marks carry symbolic properties, and that humans organize information in context with their own experiences, emotions and perceptions are essential understandings for any medium and are constant themes across media.”
By the time they reach the upper school, many students have uncovered their personal creative expression and are busy honing their individual art skills and talents for both college and career. Course offerings include an array of beginner- and advancedlevel electives as well as portfolio-building courses such as Honors Directed Portfolio and Advanced Placement Studio Art, with concentrations in drawing, two-dimensional design and three-dimensional design. Both Martinez and Agüero-Esparza provide their students with ample opportunities to get their hands dirty before they must demonstrate proper technique. As in lower and middle school, effort, engagement and risk-taking are stressed throughout the making process.
“Once you have been given the tools to externalize complex thoughts and emotions in a way that not only fulfills your base needs for expression but creates meaning in others’ minds, the world unlocks,” said Martinez. “Art creates space for students to not only expand their notions about the world but to expand their understanding of how they might share these ideas with others.”
Martinez, whose own photography has been displayed in several solo, collaborative and group exhibitions throughout the nation, further noted, “From day one, I let [students] know that this is all about them. Art is a means of showing others your way of seeing. Every demo, conversation, etc., is always with that in mind. We focus on trying something and then reflecting on the product’s ability to give voice to their feelings and philosophies.
“There is no profession that doesn’t benefit from an understanding of one’s own way of seeing,” Martinez added. “Being able to express yourself, understand how meaning is made and control, rather than consume, media is essential for all careers. More importantly, the truly vital aspects of art – a dialogue with the unknown, making visible the unseen, imagining undefined notions – are part of living a full life. This is something that most children do better than we do, but they often need it to be reflected back to them in order to create a practice around it.”
Unveiling a Masterpiece
Harker’s pièce de résistance, of course, is the continued overwhelming success of its alumni. There are those who, while at Harker, won one or more Alliance for Young Artists & Writers’ Scholastic Art & Writing Awards – an award shared with artists including designer-to-the-stars Zac Posen and pop art icon Andy Warhol. There are those who have gone on to attend some of the country’s finest art and design schools. And there are those who have turned their passion into their profession. Some have even followed in the footsteps of their favorite Harker teachers, resulting in an arts education that has truly come full circle.
“I’ve wanted to pursue a career in the arts for quite a while. I would say I probably developed a firm grasp of my aspirations in high school,” says freelance graphic designer Vladimir Sepetov ’11, who snagged a grand total of six Scholastic Art & Writing Awards during his senior year.
Sepetov majored in visual communication design at the University of Washington, scored an artists and repertoire internship with Interscope Records, and has been designing hip-hop album covers ever since – most notably, Grammy Award-winning rapper and songwriter Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly.” The best part of his job, he said, is “making my parents proud and seeing a vision come to life.”
Shelby Drabman ’09, who studied textile and fashion design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, serves as artist-in-residence at The Hamlin School in San Francisco, where she directs an after-school art program for girls in kindergarten through fourth grade. A life-size sculpture of Sesame Street’s Oscar the Grouch – a four-month-long project completed at Harker – is a friendly fixture in her classroom.
Kevin Saxon ’10, attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Architecture Career Discovery Program, scholarly seminars at Spéos Photographic Institute in Paris and the Danish Institute for Study Abroad in Copenhagen, interned at Robert Edson Swain Architecture + Design, and graduated from Rhode Island School of Design’s furniture design program. After that preparation, he landed a job as a design and manufacturing engineer at Northwood Design Partners in Union City. The firm handles big-name clients including Facebook, Google, Netflix, Pinterest, Samsung, Twitter and YouTube. Named Best in Show at Harker’s 2010 Advanced Placement Studio Art Exhibition, one of Saxon’s pieces, the “+1 Chair,” was featured at the 2015 International Contemporary Furniture Fair at New York City’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.
Previously Harker’s full-time advancement associate, Kelsey Chung ’10 got her start as an art instructor at Harker Summer Camp Plus, where she taught a course on Warhol and his contemporaries as well as another on Paul Cézanne and Jackson Pollock. Chung took Advanced Placement Studio Art with Agüero-Esparza and Advanced Placement Art History with history and social science department chair Donna Gilbert. She is an alumna of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where she majored in art and design, with a concentration in studio art. Chung is currently working toward a higher degree in the history of art and design at Pratt Institute; its motto, “Be true to your work, and your work will be true to you,” fits for an artist like her.
“Since I was 5, I was always interested in art. It began with the dream of working – animating – for Disney,” said Chung. “Later, in sixth grade, I began painting, which I continued and pursued in college. Art history was a subject I never really thought about but enjoyed immensely and ultimately inspired me to go to graduate school,” she added.
New York City-based fashion designer Anna Huang ’07 is grateful for the eventual growth in the diversity of art courses at the upper school.
“The visual arts program was relatively small when I was a freshman/sophomore at Harker, and there were not a lot of students interested in pursuing careers in art and design,” recalls Huang, who began stitching and sewing clothing for her dolls as a young girl. Significant plans were in the works to expand the department while Huang was a student. “Especially on a campus dominated by excellence in STEM fields, it was significant that we had the space and resources to showcase our achievements in a different way,” she said.
That stick-to-itiveness paid off in a big way. After graduating, with distinction, from California College of the Arts, Huang would find herself designing for not one, not two, but three household names – Ralph Lauren, Cole Haan and Levi Strauss. Just as her fashions continue to grace the streets of New York City, she remains indebted to her Harker teachers for their encouragement, support, guidance, acceptance and feedback.
“They patiently worked with us to hash out artistic solutions to our creative blocks and create pieces that were relevant to our personal identities. Additionally, they always urged us to observe the world from alternative angles and draw inspiration from unexpected places,” Huang says. “Being open-minded is integral to being a good artist and designer, and I think Harker’s visual arts faculty did an outstanding job of imparting this to us.”
This story was originally published in the Summer 2017 edition of Harker Magazine
Technology is bred in the bone at Harker. Classrooms have enhanced learning hardware and software, students use a variety of technology tools in class and at home, and kindergartners through grade 12 students take challenging computer science classes.
Teachers at Harker introduce students to high-tech tools they can use in a host of settings. STEM classes and hands-on experience are part and parcel of the school’s education that extends beyond computer science labs. Starting a decade ago, Daniel Hudkins, director of information technology service and support, helped pioneer the integration of various technologies throughout Harker’s campuses. Harker has always had the attitude that the process and the product were more important than the tool, so the school avoids relying on any one hardware or software product when competitive alternatives are available, he noted.
Early Days
Harker, founded in 1893 as Manzanita Hall, opened its upper school in 1998. Long known for its science-heavy curriculum, the opening of a high school allowed Harker to continue its tradition of excellence while developing best practices as the high school grew. Both the middle and upper schools had the usual array of desktop computers for student use, but to ensure students had access to adequate tools, the school instituted a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy for the upper school in its third year, 2000-01, Hudkins said. The math department began using Mathematica for certain classes, requiring students in those classes to bring their own laptops, which laid the groundwork for more widespread BYOD plans.
“By 2002-03, it was decided to require Mathematica, and therefore laptops, for all students taking pre-calculus or above, which extended the program to many other students,” Hudkins said.
About the same time, computers were being introduced in the lower and middle schools. That use has now hardened into routine. “Apple iPads are frequently used in K-grade 2,” Hudkins said. “K-5 also have access to two Mac labs and a full class set of Mac desktops in the library.” Grades 3-5 students are provided with Chromebooks, with a 1:1 ratio of devices to students beginning in grade 4. Grade 5 students bring the devices home with them.
In middle school, students are issued schoo-lowned computers, with the choice of a Mac or PC. Students receive administrative rights during grade 7. Students are responsible for bringing the device home for homework and back to class charged up. At the end of grade 8, families can purchase the computer at a discounted rate.
The early requirements for Mathematica students to have laptops opened the door to all students being permitted to register their own laptops for use at school. By the 2004-05 school year, Hudkins said, the BYOD laptop program was required for all upper school students. With that change, all of the student-use desktops, except for journalism and graphic design, disappeared from Harker upper and middle school classrooms, though the lower school still supplies computers and one desktop resides in the middle school library.
With so much access to technology, Harker aims to ensure that all devices are used safely and appropriately by students. The school uses graduated filtering of the internet on campus to control access to the Web, with the restrictions diminishing as students get older, Hudkins said. Most of the monitoring is done by a combination of direct supervision and appropriate education for self-monitoring. “We do not ‘embed’ any monitoring programs in the devices themselves, although some parents choose to add this on their own,” he added.
One of the greatest advantages of having students bring their own devices to school, Hudkins said, is the ability to move the classroom focus to the students’ work and the students’ control instead of spending time making sure students are able to log on, reach needed software, etc. Furthermore, having students concurrently use a variety of tools to collaborate means they and their teachers spend less time on “click here” techniques and more time on learning new skills.
“As tool sets continuously evolve, students might collaborate in a Google Hangout while preparing a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint,” Hudkins said. “Some students might be participating on an iPad.” The ultimate goal, he said, is to cultivate technology fluency – how best to find the right tool for the task or problem, how to learn how to use it and how to apply what it can do in effective, and sometimes even novel, ways.
The Other Half of the Equation: Software
The use of software has intertwined with the adoption of hardware in the classroom. Supported apps and software include Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite and Apple’s software collection, to name just a few. A variety of operating systems, especially MacOS and Windows, are supported; at one time, a significant number of students used Linux variants.
Students at Harker can use Google Apps for Education, for example, to access Docs, Sheets, Forms, Drawings, Slides and Hangouts. “Google Docs has largely replaced Word in the [middle school] English classroom,” said Scott Kley Contini, learning, innovation and design (LID) director for grades 6-8. “The ability to collaborate live within a document has revolutionized English writing. Teachers can interact in real time with students and peer editing can happen in the moment.”
Hudkins noted that in the upper school, research writing requires more complex formatting and Microsoft Word is more frequently used.
The inclusion of technology in classrooms enhances Harker students’ education in myriad ways, Hudkins said. Via these apps and programs, students learn the rhetoric of presentation in a digital age, along with clarity of thought, synthesis of material and analytic thinking, he added.
“Each software and platform has its strengths,” Hudkins said. “iPads offer focused simplicity. Chromebooks offer easy access that is not device dependent. Laptops offer local computation and storage not relying on the availability of the cloud.”
Other software in use at Harker includes Logger Pro for digital data collection, Membean for vocabulary building, Wolfram Mathematica and Fathom for furthering math and statistics skills, and Minecraft for construction and synthesis, he said. “There is also a burgeoning list of tools used in the new Innovation Lab at the middle school,” he added.
All these apps and programs have real value, offering new approaches to understanding coursework. The Geometer’s Sketchpad software, for instance, is used heavily in geometry classes, Kley Contini said, letting students construct geometrical shapes, but the software can be used a variety of ways to understand math, “allowing students to play with mathematical equations and see visual representations of mathematical outputs.”
For higher math levels, the Mathematica program is used selectively to allow students to manipulate mathematical equations as well as begin to explore mathematical logic in a similar way to computer programming, Kley Contini said. This software is used across professional engineering, science and computer disciplines, which can include 3-D image processing and data mining. Students also can use Desmos, which lets them manipulate mathematical variables and see instant output changes. By using these tools, Kley Contini said, math becomes more real for students and helps make connections to concepts that might otherwise get lost in a series or in word problems on paper.
Computer Science in the Classroom
The momentum driving Harker’s use of hardware and software built up incrementally, driven, to a degree, by upper school computer science class development.
Back in 2003, computer science classes were only available in the upper school in the form of AP Computer Science A, AP Computer Science AB and an introductory programming course, said Eric Nelson, upper school computer science department chair.
Computer science soon became a graduation requirement. Technology use began to spread in the lower and middle schools as administrators adapted curricula to build a foundation of computer classes to support the upper school requirements.
“In the lower school, students were learning how to work with technology using AlphaSmart word processors and a computer lab,” Nelson said. “The middle school also had computer labs where the students began to learn some of the fundamentals of programming.”
Since those early computer science initiatives, Harker has developed a full K-12 program. “The major changes occurred when I became department chair in 2008,” Nelson said. “I saw the need for a two-track program in the upper school to address the wide range of abilities and interests in our students. I worked with the department faculty to create two paths through our developing program.”
The fast track was Advanced Programming, Nelson said, which fed into AP Computer Science A with Data Structures. The slower track was Programming to AP Computer Science A to Honors Data Structures. “The content is the same, but the latter is done in four semesters rather than three,” he said.
Students who complete those courses can then take Advanced Topics offerings: AI Expert Systems, AI Neural Networks, Programming Languages and Numerical Methods, which are taught by Nelson on a four-year rotation. Computer Architecture, and Compilers and Interpreters, are taught by two other faculty members on a two-year rotation.
Courses are created and taught by faculty specializing in those fields, Nelson said. Harker also offers an introductory course called Digital World for students who really do not want to take computer science, but need to meet the graduation requirement. “The course is enriching enough where some students have moved on to programming after taking it,” he said.
The formal computer science structure in the upper school brought new requirements to the middle school, which then resulted in a reworking of their entire program, Nelson explained. The middle school introduced computer science entry requirements for their students, which, in turn, influenced changes to curriculum at the lower school.
As a result of this evolutionary process, Nelson said, Harker now offers computer science starting in the elementary school grades. “In kindergarten, the students learn the basics of algorithmic thinking using little robot bugs that get their instructions with cards that are placed on the floor,” he said.
Lisa Diffenderfer, computer science department chair and LID director for K-grade 5, said the lower school computer science department has added a plethora of opportunities for programming with robots in recent years. Grade 1 students, for example, take computer science classes three times per week in their third trimester. “Students have the opportunity to learn programming fundamentals by programming a mini robot called a Bee-Bot,” Diffenderfer said.
With its colorful, kid-friendly design, BeeBot is a tool for teaching young children problem-solving skills and estimation. Diffenderfer said students work as a team to move their Bee-Bot to specific areas on a game board, and use the related iPad app to practice using directional language and algorithmic thinking.
Students in grade 2 can work with another robot, called Dash, to learn programming fundamentals – but with visual programming to command Dash to perform specific tasks. The robot works with an app called Blockly that uses visual blocks rather than text to create code for Dash to follow.
Robots are finding their way into other curriculum areas, Diffenderfer said. For example, there are plans to have fifth grade students in an English class program a robot to retrace Bilbo’s hero’s journey after they read “The Hobbit.”
The robotics program is still growing, with changes made yearly at all levels, Nelson said. In the upper school the most recent additions are two robotics courses – one software- and one hardware-based – that sit between the programming and the AP courses (see Rise of the Machines, page 8, the story of Harker’s competitive robotics program).
These new courses serve two purposes, he said. One is to support the robotics program by giving non-AP level students a stronger background. The other is to catch those students whose enthusiasm has gotten ahead of their abilities. “In other words, if they get a C in Programming, they can still continue in computer science [via the robotics courses], even though they could not move directly into an AP course at that point,” Nelson said.
The AP computer science courses teach the students the foundations of objectoriented programming using Java with an emphasis on algorithmic thinking and good coding practices. Students learn to design and document first and then code second, which is an uphill battle even with professional programmers. “As my former colleague Richard Page was fond of saying, ‘four hours of coding can save you 10 minutes of design,’” Nelson said with a smile.
Because of Harker’s rich computer science offerings in the upper school, and the structure that goes with them, the middle and lower schools had to adapt to meet the newer entry requirements, he said. That subsequently drove new entry requirements between grades and across divisions. As a result, Harker students get early introductions to algorithmic thinking, robotics and programming.
“When combined with the science and mathematics offerings, as well as the research opportunities we have here, our students can discover early on if they have a passion for STEM and have opportunities to follow it,” Nelson said.
Contributor João-Pierre S. Ruth is based in the New York City area.
This story originally appeared in the Winter 2016 Harker Magazine.
Kate Shanahan is the K-5 English department chair. A self-described “New England girl,” Shanahan was born in Middletown, Conn., and grew up in Connecticut and New Hampshire. She lives in downtown San Jose with her husband and two sons, and the family may be growing soon with the addition of a dog! She’ll be participating in the Shanghai World Foreign Language Middle School teacher exchange this year. Shanahan shares some fun insights with Harker Magazine about life, good advice and having great vision.
What are you obsessed with?
Good grammar. It’s a blessing and curse. Most days I can’t read a simple Starbucks menu without double-checking the spelling of each individual drink.
What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?
A college professor once told me that “good teachers leave their backpacks at the door.” It took me a while to understand the power of his statement, but now it’s clear: Don’t bring my baggage into the classroom. Leave it at the door and be present for my students.
Brag about something.
I have 20/15 vision. Once I was getting a routine eye exam, and the nurse called the doctor over just to watch me read the eye chart.
What is something that you pretend to understand when you really don’t?
When I was a kid, my family rented the movie “Wall Street.” My dad paused the movie and spent over 30 minutes explaining the stock market to my sister and me. I still don’t totally get it.
What is the biggest risk you have ever taken in your life?
I moved to California by myself at 24. I left my family and friends behind and came to work at Harker. That first year wasn’t easy, but my inspiring students and friendships with faculty made me realize that this was where I wanted to be.
Where in the world are you the happiest?
Although traveling has its perks, I am a total homebody. I love the comfort of my home and hubby, chatting with my neighbors, hearing my kids play outside, and sitting on my front porch watching the world go by.
This story originally appeared in the winter 2016 Harker Magazine.
Keith Hirota is Harker’s middle school history department chair, as well as co-principal of the middle school summer program. He counts running an 8-mile race in 52 minutes and earning his B.A. in history and his M.Ed. among his greatest accomplishments, and, along with his wife and son, enjoys his adorable rescue dog, Buddy, who they think is a terrier/corgi mix. Hirota was born in Pennsylvania, but had the good fortune to grow up in Hawaii, an experience that clearly contributes to who he is today. He reflects on what Hawaii means to him and some great advice he’s always tried to follow.
What makes you feel like a kid again? Visiting Hilo and doing the activities with my son that I did when I was a child, like body surfing and boogie boarding at Hapuna Beach, dining at the local hole-in-the-wall restaurants and jumping into freshwater ponds from a 10-foot waterfall.
What do you love most about your life? Living each day surrounded by positive, kind and thoughtful students and colleagues.
What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten? My first job was in high school, bagging groceries at the market. My uncle told me, “Remember, there’s always something to do. If you’re not bagging groceries, pick up a broom or straighten out some shelves … always find something to do.”
For what in your life do you feel most grateful? Having been raised by my grandmother, aunts and uncles.
What helps you persevere when you feel like giving up? My judo and wrestling coaches instilled in us that quitting is the “easy” way out.
When did you first really feel like an adult? Surrounded by middle schoolers, I have yet to cross that road.
This article originally appeared in the winter 2016 Harker Magazine
Harker students sent cards to more than 100 service members this year via Operation Gratitude, and many more in uniform enjoyed treats courtesy of Halloween candy donations.
Grade 3 students have been sending cards to those serving in the military for years, and this year the effort included grade 6 students. According to its website, Operation Gratitude sends 200,000-plus care packages to veterans, first responders, recruits, wounded heroes, care givers and overseas U.S. service members every year.
Elise Robichaud, grade 3 English teacher, pioneered the outreach effort to honor those in the military. Each year, she gathers the names of relatives of Harker students, faculty and staff who are serving and arranges for third graders to make cards for them.
One Saturday afternoon in September, in a parent-driven effort, sixth graders gathered at school to make cards for Operation Gratitude. About two dozen students produced about 40 cards. That was just the opening volley in thisyear’s efforts to fill packages and bring smiles to the faces of those deployed overseas.
Then in early October, Robichaud started her third grade classes working on cards for military personnel. This year, they sent cards to 70 Harker relations, as well as a batch of cards to Operation Gratitude for that organization to distribute.
Harker students also contributed Halloween candy to Operation: Care and Comfort, a Bay Area organization that sends goodies to adopted units overseas. “This year I collaborated with my former room parent Robin Feinman-Marino,” Robichaud said. “I had her daughter, Sofie (grade 4), in my homeroom last year, and her cousin is currently serving. They were asking for extra Halloween candy, so we happily stepped up. The children in third grade, and some from grades 4 and 5, filled up three giant tubs with Halloween candy.”
Veterans Visits
Each year Robichaud recruits speakers to come talk to the students about how much it means to get cards and other items from students. “Last year we had former Harker teacher and retired colonel Ray Fowler visit (he was a submarine-hunting pilot during the Cold War) and Col. Patrick Shea (a doctor in the U.S. Air Force), brother of chef Matt Shea, visit,” said Robichaud. “This year I organized another visit from the colonel. He came on Nov. 8, right before Veterans Day, to discuss the importance of veterans and to thank the children for their cards.”
Robichaud noted that the recent contentious election left students with questions about basic freedoms and the outreach helped drive home some basic democratic ideals. The project “helped to explain to the children that we live in this great country where everyone can have different opinions and where people vote on their leaders,” Robichaud said. “However, we would not have that freedom unless we had these amazing people who were willing to serve in our military and defend our country. I told them that not everyone in the world can enjoy these freedoms, but we can because of our amazing military and their sacrifices.”
Robichaud said the response to the student efforts has been overwhelming. “This year,” she noted, “we had a special video message sent from Commander Mike Kent, uncle to one of my students.” And San Francisco 49er tight end Garrett Celek, a 49ers service award winner, signed a football and sent a personalized video message for the students to keep up the good work.
“I have incredible stories from parents who told me that this was the first time they have connected with a [serving] relative,” added Robichaud. “A co-worker told me that the children’s cards brought her Marine husband and his tough buddies to tears.”
This article originally appeared in the winter 2016 Harker Magazine.
Eric Nelson has the distinction of teaching nine different courses at the upper school, seven on a regular basis. He is the computer science department chair, runs the robotics program, and teaches a variety of science classes, including astronomy and physics.
Though born and (mostly) raised in the Southern California town of Downey, Nelson spent his middle and high school years in the Los Gatos mountains (and attended Los Gatos High School), and he keeps those roots alive by living in Boulder Creek.
He and his wife, Kathleen, have five children between them, including Chandler, who graduated from Harker last year, and two grandchildren. His pithy answers to our questions illustrate his humor and directness.
What makes you feel like a kid again?
Disneyland.
What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?
A professor, Dr. Michael Zeilik, said, “Be simple and direct.”
What are you doing when you feel most alive?
Standing quietly in the forest and just listening. Walking on an isolated beach, and again, just listening. Being able to focus on all the sensations, sights, smells and sounds where most people would simply find silence.
In what way are you above average?
I was an astrophysicist. What else do I need?
What is something that you pretend to understand when you really don’t?
Women.
Why do you do what you do?
Because I enjoy it. Life is too short to do something every day that you don’t enjoy doing.
This article originally appeared in the winter 2016 Harker Magazine.
Two Class of 2015 alumnae have taken their passion for food and journalism to new levels with In a Nutshell Food, a YouTube channel they created.
Fred Chang and Priscilla Pan have been making how-to videos of delicious foods while pursuing their academic dreams in California and abroad. Pan attends the University of Southern California, where she is studying biomedical engineering with a mechanical emphasis. “I’m also planning to minor either in entrepreneurship or computer science, two subjects that I think will greatly complement my engineering background,” she said.
Chang is attending Yale-NUS in Singapore. She is considering a politics, philosophy and economics major with concentrations in philosophy and economics. “On top of that, I’m a computer science minor – strictly speaking, a mathematical, computational and statistical sciences minor with a focus in computer science,” she said. Before graduating from Harker, the friends began making fun food videos under the name In a Nutshell Food – and then opportunity knocked. “Our journalism teacher, Ms. [Ellen] Austin, was always a huge supporter of In a Nutshell Food,” said Pan, “and when the Columbia Scholastic Press Association (CSPA) award season rolled around, she encouraged basically everyone to submit their work – articles, videos, photos, etc.”
The pair earned a first-place prize for their video, giving momentum to what was already a fun project. Chang was surprised when she heard the results. “I had no words. It was really nice to have the affirmation that we were indeed doing a good job, especially because it was mostly just for fun,” she said.
The duo had posted 29 videos as of mid- October, and the effort to keep the pipeline full while in college has been a labor of love. “We knew we’d always want to continue making videos,” said Pan. “Especially the summer after our junior year, when many others were attending summer internships and research positions, we were in the kitchen filming and cooking.”
Though Pan and Chang opted to monetize their YouTube channel by allowing ads, they continue to be motivated by the purest desires – good journalism and good food. “At the core of it all,” said Pan, “we started making food videos because as journalism students, we really enjoyed writing, photographing and taking videos of our niche, which was food. I especially love feeding my creativity by coming up with unique ways to film our videos.”
Chang agreed the payoff is in doing something they love. “I don’t know how else to say it: food is my life’s passion,” she said. “Food videography for me is the most wholesome format of sharing my love for food online. If I had enough money to survive on for the rest of my life, I’d just spend my time engaging with food media and eating and cooking. All of the improvement and self-learning is indeed great, but I don’t need any extrinsic motivation because this is how I would spend my time anyway.”
This summer’s videos covered a variety of foods, based on season, upcoming holidays and food trends. “We have a lot of current food trends (like smoothie bowls),” said Pan, “our favorite baked goods, easy back-to-school meals, drinks, etc. We want to keep some stuff a secret!”
“Subscribe to our channel to find out!” Chang said. What’s next for In a Nutshell Food? “We’re definitely going to continue producing biweekly cooking videos along with vlog channel videos through the end of 2016 and most likely through our sophomore year of college,” said Pan. “But our future plans might still change.”
Chang is also hopeful but practical. “For now it’s really more of a let’s-try-to-make-it-happen thing, but there isn’t much of a longterm plan beyond the semester.”
This article originally appeared in the winter 2016 Harker Magazine.
Editor’s Note: This project took place in the 2015-16 school year; students are identified by the ages they were at the time.
For several weeks, Alex Micchelli, a 5-year-old transitional kindergarten student at Harker Preschool, kept returning to the clay table, engrossed in making ball ramps. One day Alexandria Kerekez, the preschool’s visual arts specialist, sat down next to him and asked him what his goal was in making the clay ramps.
As Alex gingerly held his tiny clay ball, he explained in one of those magic moments teachers love to have, “I want the ball to roll down the sculpture like at STEM lab.” Art had met science and it was good!
Along with plenty of indoor and outdoor play time, Harker Preschool has three specialized areas of development: STEM, visual arts, and music & movement. These specialty classes are rich with activity centers and educational materials, offering a balance between child-directed exploratory learning and teacher directed activities.
Alex had been captivated by the physics of things that roll since starting at Harker Preschool as a 3-year-old. He worked with ramps and balls – measuring the slope of ramps and the distance the balls traveled – and wanted to build a permanent pathway that he could take home and share with his family. He ended up creating a project that engrossed many other preschoolers, noted Robyn Stone, STEM specialist.
During a subsequent art session, children excitedly experimented with Alex’s ball ramp design. A variety of prototypes began to emerge, noted Kerekez. Teams of children collaborated on different strategies to form the ball ramps. The young students debated whether ramps should have a “flat slab” base or a “single coil” base, each a method of stabilizing an object with an irregular bottom, noted Kerekez. As the projects progressed, the effort drew the class together, with groups of students joining forces to create a communal twisting, turning ball ramp.
To extend the interest in the ball ramp project, Kerekez, Stone, and music & movement specialist Mara Beckerman joined together to invite the transitional kindergarten students to create a larger musical ball ramp system out of clay for the Farm, the outdoor area of the preschool dedicated to plants and animals.
Students shaped ramp sections, which were glazed and fired, then fastened piece by piece to a fence in the Farm to create the full ramp. The children were entranced when they discovered that glass marbles created a symphony of tones as they ricocheted down the ceramic tracks. “Listen! It makes music!” exclaimed Nathan Zhang, age 3. That was just the beginning.
The tinkling of the balls down the ramp was a revelation to the children, and they immediately wanted to enhance the sound. “Let’s put a violin on it!” suggested Sophie Crosswhite, age 4, reaching for the sky. Realizing that mounting a violin above the ramp was impractical, the children began experimenting with smaller objects.
During their music & movement sessions, the children tested nails and washers as music makers, suspending them over the ramp so the rolling ball tapped them as it passed. The children noted the items were too heavy, preventing the balls from continuing down the ramp, and they lacked musical tone. “I can’t hear anything” was the general, disappointed response, when asked to listen to the ball hitting the bits of hardware.
However, Beckerman was ready with little jingle bells from a craft store. These produced a highly satisfactory sound as the balls tapped them in passing.
With the ramp complete, and a ball poised at the top to make a trial run, 3-year-old Jacob Shimelfarb’s eyes widened and he released the ball. Zipping down the ramp, the ball rolled under a bridge, ringing bells along the way. The ball passed through a tunnel and leaped off the curved end of the ramp into a basket. “Wow!” exclaimed Jacob.
Other students were equally impressed. “It’s like little fairies in the farm!” said Emmabelle White, age 4, when she heard the bells ting-a-ling. The musical results prompted the preschool kids and staff to refer to this project as “singing” ball ramps.
In the STEM lab, all Harker preschoolers have the opportunity to freely conduct experiments in the physical sciences, noted Stone. “Exploring various materials in a self-directed way enables a child to discover the properties of objects and the physics of motion,” she added. Stone supports the children’s explorations by asking questions to engage them and help them become familiar with the academic language that describes the phenomena observed.
The mechanics of setting up the track was one of the challenges transitional kindergarten students faced, and a number of skills were acquired as the project developed, Kerekez noted. The children chose the glazes and learned about the firing process, then had to make the segments work together. Students hung the segments along the fence and suspended the noisemakers above the ramp, just close enough to be hit by the rolling ball. These were all fairly complex efforts for 5-year-olds.
At every stage of this project, noted Kerekez, one constant was the enthusiasm for sharing ideas and problem-solving as a group. Before installing the ramps on the fence, the students built prototypes in the art studio to test their ideas. They folded paper ramps into varying slopes to test how the balls would roll. The students agreed the ramps would have to be installed one at a time, at different angles, for the project to be successful. Constructing the ramp was a very collaborative effort, Kerekez observed.
The enhancements added another interesting dimension. To suspend the bells at just the right points above the ramp, “the children learned to wrap wire with their fingers and needle-nose pliers,” said Beckerman. “Once attached, the children ran tests to make sure each bell was positioned in the correct spot for the ball to tap it and keep rolling.”
Finally, after observing the completed, “singing” ball ramp in action, it was time for some theorizing. Like true physicists, they made observations and shared their findings.
Srikrishna Kataru, age 5, observed that the ball “rolls ’cause the air pushes it. If there is a lot of air, the ball will roll fast.” Overhearing the discussion, Hemansh Gupta, age 5, noted, “It is the slide that makes it go, like when I bike down a hill, and it goes very fast.”
Thinking beyond ceramic balls, Cynthia Zhang, age 5, noted, “This ball track is for a roly poly [pill bug] to slide on it on the Farm.”
Ethan Yu, age 5, added, “Yes, but you have to make a rectangle slab and bend it here at the bottom, or else the bug will fall out.”
Returning to the STEM lab each week, year after year, children repeat investigations to deepen their understanding of how objects move. They are encouraged to wonder about the physical causes and effects at play – momentum, friction, force, acceleration and much more. They make observations that then inspire new questions and experiments, which sometimes lead to innovation, noted Stone.
For example, transitional kindergarten student Benjamin Kim grasped the essential element of gravity at work.He explained to his peers, “Ball tracks are like a waterfall and the balls are the water and they can fall down.”
The ball ramp project, driven by science, created using art and enhanced with music, is a great example of how the three specialty teachers joined forces to enhance learning through exploration. The ramps are aesthetically beautiful, make harmonious sounds, and engage students in a truly unique STEM experience.
The project is now in place at the preschool, and visitors delight in rolling balls down this student-made, musical, whimsically glazed ceramic ball ramp. Future generations of Harker Preschool students have the 2015-16 transitional kindergarten class to thank for the beautiful project, which surely will bring joy to the community for years to come.
Mara Beckerman, Alexandria Kerekez & Robyn Stone are the music, art and STEM specialists at Harker Preschool.
This article originally appeared in the winter 2016 Harker Magazine.
Research is at the core of many academic efforts, and to ensure Harker students have access to the information they need, Harker librarians have curated a world-class collection of databases.
“We teach children as young as 6 to use age-appropriate databases to find information for beginning research projects,” said Sue Smith, Harker’s library director, citing the recent example of first graders accessing reference articles in a database to research animal habitats.
Previously Harker’s archivist and upper school librarian, Smith currently manages the library programs at all four campuses, each grounded in information literacy, pleasure reading, robust resources and curricular collaboration.
With upward of 90 subscription databases from premier publishers like Gale, EBSCO and ProQuest at their fingertips, including ScienceDirect, Project MUSE, ARTstor and Drama Online, upper school students are able to complete elaborate English, science and social studies assignments with greater ease; and to help, they have 2/7 remote access, thanks to EZProxy and Qi Huang, the school’s electronic resources librarian. At the touch of a button, they can use Summon, the school’s web-scale discovery service, nicknamed “Power On” by students, to access the library’s digital collections and electronic resources for credible, citable content.
“While it’s impossible to quantify where our database collection ranks among other schools, we know from talking to colleagues that our offerings exceed those at most secondary schools,” said Smith, who notes the variety of Harker’s information literacy curriculum is just as important as the quality and quantity of its offerings.
Debbie Abilock, a San Francisco Bay Area educational consultant and founding editor of Knowledge Quest, the journal of the American Association of School Librarians, noted, “In terms of collection size and age, compared to the School Library Program Standards set forth in library standards adopted by the California State Board of Education in 2010, Harker’s collection is on a par with a college collection. Indeed, most independent schools have less than half of these resources – and, more importantly, even fewer subscribe to college-level databases like Project MUSE or ScienceDirect.”
Abilock recently published an open educational resources module for pre-service educators that points to Harker’s “American Decades: 1970s” eighth grade project guide as a prime example of a curation tool. With more than 30 years of experience as a school administrator, curriculum coordinator, teaching librarian and information specialist, Abilock is something of an expert in database curation.
“One could have wonderful resources,” Abilock said, “but without the guides [Harker] created, and the instruction and services they provide, the library resources would simply remain a lovely, inert warehouse. Harker’s librarians are outstanding curators who add value by carefully selecting specific resources and tools for particular projects. It’s an outstanding collection, curated by educators with clearly articulated learning and teaching goals, which creates the unique ‘chemistry’ that results in powerful student learning.”
All of this means students have tremendous resources to call on for their studies. Those taking the College Board’s Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition class tap into JSTOR and Project MUSE as they pen research papers on Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” and James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
Meanwhile, students in Chris Spenner’s Research Methods and Advanced Research classes are conducting college-level science projects on a broad range of scientific disciplines, such as agricultural science, virus geometry, marine biology, microbiology, astrophysics, analytical chemistry, materials science and machine learning, most often turning to ScienceDirect and Nature.
“They need access to peer-reviewed science literature to inform their own procedures and to situate their own work in the larger scientific context,” said Spenner. “I’m a little jealous; I used to spend hours in the science library doing what they can now do much more thoroughly in a matter of minutes.”
Throughout his upper school years, Kai-Siang Ang, grade 12, president of the Math Club and a Stanford University early admission candidate, said he has consulted an abundance of databases for extensive projects on a variety of topics, including Catherine the Great, the Black Death, and the Supreme Court cases of Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, among others. Ang noted he has benefited from Harker’s robust information literacy instruction as a participant in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Program for Research in Mathematics, Engineering and Science for High School Students (MIT PRIMES).
Now, Ang has begun paying back into the databases. He co-authored a paper for MIT PRIMES with Laura Schaposnik, an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, titled, “On the Geometry of Regular Icosahedral Capsids Containing Disymmetrons,” and the paper has been uploaded to the arXiv, a repository for physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics documents, as well as having been submitted to the Siemens Science Competition and sent to the Journal of Structural Biology.
Alumni recognize the value of Harker’s database collection. Zarek Drozda ’16, former John Near Excellence in History Endowment scholar, and Natalie Simonian ’16, former Mitra Family Endowment scholar, know firsthand just how valuable these sophisticated databases can be when pursuing research priorities of the highest caliber. Following a rigorous application process, each conducted yearlong, grant-funded independent research and produced a scholarly paper on a topic of interest to them – the Panic of 1873 for Drozda, and the Russian Revolution for Simonian.
“I feel prepared not only for any assigned research projects but my B.A./B.S. thesis as well,” said Drozda, an economics and public policy studies double major at the University of Chicago, who arrived on that campus this fall with plenty of AP credit and a certificate in technical theater from the Harker Conservatory. “The yearlong project teaches the research process on a level not usually available to high school students, and the librarians, their mentorship and their resources made it possible.”
Simonian, a bioengineering major at the University of California, Berkeley (her team finished second in last year’s Berkeley Bioengineering Honor Society High School Competition), said Harker offers many of the same databases that her college does. “We had a small literature search due for my bioengineering class, and knowing ahead of time which databases I could use to find scientific journals, and that databases that consolidated peer-reviewed journals actually existed, was extremely helpful in making that search much easier and faster,” she noted.
Two of this year’s 10 Near and Mitra scholars are seniors Andrew Rule, co-editor-in-chief of Harker’s Eclectic Literary Magazine and a frequent contributor to the upper school’s library book blog, and Tiffany Zhu, co-assistant conductor of women’s chamber choral ensemble Cantilena. Both have excelled in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards; he won three National Silver Medals (Short Story) and she received two Honorable Mentions (Dramatic Script and Flash Fiction). Both have used Harker’s databases for more than just coursework and extracurricular research. Rule relishes his ability to retrieve the full texts of every issue of the country’s leading literary magazines since their foundings, while Zhu has stumbled upon the full texts of economics papers quoted in The New York Times as well as population studies of Kiev, Ukraine.
Among this year’s Near and Mitra research topics are artistic innovations during the AIDS epidemic; the lasting repercussions of the Second Chechen War; and Rule’s primary focus, 1970s Native American literature.
“Harker’s databases, especially JSTOR and ebrary, give Near and Mitra scholars access to materials in the country’s best academic journals and university presses,” said Rule. “Just like in college, lack of access to information is never an obstacle we face with all of this scholarship at our fingertips.”
Rule noted the databases are, of course, available to all students seeking information for any reason. “Even better, the databases run from general reference (ABC-CLIO) to in-depth scholarship (ProQuest Research Library), so I’ve been given a stepladder up to college-level resources to prepare me for more advanced research incrementally,” he said.
A Russian culture, history, language, literature and music enthusiast, Zhu has elected to examine Russian and Soviet writer, dramatist and political activist Maxim Gorky’s role in shaping socialist realism literature. Central to her research, she said, have been JSTOR’s resources dating back to the 1950s and ’60s and those on literary theory and philosophy. Through ebrary, an online library of more than 140,000 nonfiction e-books, she has accessed more contemporary English language secondary sources, “a challenge since the majority of scholarship on my topic is in Russian,” she added.
“I know that in college, my Mitra paper, which feels so special now, is likely to become a regular endeavor and will effectively happen again in my senior year of college,” Zhu said. “I love that I can get the process of learning to search databases, figuring out which databases specialize in which fields and so on, out of the way while I’m still in high school. That way, in college, I can dive straight into the actual research and, right off the bat, start asking the important questions, like which articles and books might further or change the direction of my investigations as opposed to how I can find them.”
For Smith, who has been a member of the Harker community since 2002, these and other student and alumni testimonials – she has heard more than a few over the years – serve as the ultimate form of evidence. “It’s a satisfying message that never grows old.”