Sarah Mohammed, grade 5, won a bronze medal for archery at the 2016 California State Indoor Championships, in the women’s under-12 division. Her score can be found in this link.
The official medal ceremony will be held on Feb. 27. Mohammed will also be going onto compete in the nationals to represent California. Nationals indoor competitions takes place over many weekends all over the United States, lasting a couple days on average.
Here’s a nice mention of Sarah’s qualification in the San Jose Mercury’s Sports Shorts, too! http://www.mercurynews.com/high-school-sports/ci_29441541/sports-shorts-saunders-selected-maac-35th-anniversary-womens
Three Harker students received the highest possible scores on their Advanced Placement exams, according to the College Board. Vedaad Shakib, grade 11, and Sahana Srinivasan, grade 10, were two of just 67 students nationwide to earn a top score on the computer science exam. Janet Lee, grade 12, was one of 54 students to do the same in microeconomics.
Last year, 2.5 million U.S. high school students took AP exams. Of those, only 322 earned the highest possible score.
Each year around Thanksgiving, the middle school kicks off the holiday season with its canned food drive. With the “season of giving” now behind us, Lorena Martinez, BEST director for the middle school, reflected on the success of this year’s drive, which was hosted by the Service Club in conjunction with Second Harvest Food Bank.
“Last year, millions of Americans lived in homes without enough food to eat, some of them in our own backyard,” reported Martinez, noting that canned and non-perishable food items were collected in containers located in advisory rooms throughout the Blackford campus.
At the start of the drive, Martinez had told the students, “if we collect 5,000 cans, approximately 10 cans per student, Mr. Hathaway and I will dress up as turkeys before Thanksgiving break!” Although they didn’t meet the 5,000-can challenge, students felt great about helping those less fortunate during the holidays.
“It’s wonderful to be able to have fun while helping out those less fortunate. … Together we can make a difference in someone’s life,” noted Martinez.
In other news, middle school students also are collecting toiletries and assembling packets to take to a local women’s and children’s shelter. This project will continue throughout the school year.
The Harker Speaker Series and an audience of about 80 welcomed author and historian Dennis McNally on Jan. 14. McNally’s biography of Jack Kerouac, “Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America,” was first published in 1979. He then spent much of the 1980s and ’90s traveling with the Grateful Dead, publishing “A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead” in 2002. Prior to the appearance, he met and conversed with a group of Harker students who are currently studying Kerouac’s work.
McNally began his talk by sharing how he came to be an authority on Kerouac. “One of the fixed rules of reading history is that to a considerable extent, you learn more about the time the book was written than you necessarily do about its subject,” he said.
Although McNally did not experience the 1960s counterculture up close, he held a fascination with the period and the many cultural changes it brought. Upon arriving at graduate school in the early ’70s, he quickly became bored with the typical graduate student’s routine of “learn this, regurgitate that and so forth.” He decided to choose his dissertation topic early, and because the ’60s were too recent, settled on the Beat Generation.
“What came to fascinate me about Kerouac … is that he did something incredibly noble,” said McNally. Having published his first novel to some critical success in 1951, Kerouac then set out to write something he believed would never be published. Those writings would later become his seminal 1957 novel “On the Road.”
That novel, McNally said, caused an uproar in American culture because it represented a growing challenge to the status quo. “The status quo social life of America in 1957 was fixed and as rigid and as boring as really any time in American history,” McNally observed. Massive disruptions of the previous decades, including the Great Depression and World War II, had led Americans to treasure this stability.
Juvenile delinquency, McNally argued, was a significant concern for many Americans, and the popularity of “On the Road” only exacerbated those fears. The book subsequently became popular with many influential figures of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia.
Funnily enough, none of this may have happened had the famously grumpy New York Times book reviewer Orville Prescott not been on vacation when “On the Road” was published. A writer named Gilbert Millstein was assigned to review the book, which he praised, giving Kerouac his first big boost into the limelight. “Sales took off and never stopped,” McNally recalled.
“’On the Road’ also brought fame and notoriety to the so-called ‘beat generation,'” McNally continued, “which shunned the conformism that dominated so much of American culture at the time. [Kerouac] saw that, and I would argue that it was a demand for a spiritual regeneration of what had become a very boring and conformist and utterly consumer-addicted country.”
Critics of Kerouac mistook this message for a call to violence, which McNally remarked “says more about the critics than it does about Kerouac.”
Following the talk, McNally took questions from the audience, discussing such topics as the beat movement’s influence on the San Francisco counterculture and his thoughts on the future generation of writers.
Harker dance students Karina Chen, grade 7, and Chloe Chen, grade 8, recently competed at the Hollywood Connection dance competition in Santa Clara, where they won a first place gold medal for lyrical dance in the 11-13 age group. Karina also earned the chance to receive a Hollywood makeover, while Chloe was put in the running for a special studio scholarship for a week of unlimited classes at the Millennium Dance Complex.
Both students are enrolled in Harker’s middle school dance program as members of the grades 7-8 girls dance group Showstoppers, and Karina was previously a member of Dance Fusion, the coed dance group for grades 4-6.
Jonathan Ma was today named a finalist in this year’s Intel Science Talent Search. As one of 40 finalists selected from more than 1,750 initial entrants, Ma will travel to Washington, D.C. in March for the final stage of competition, where more than $1 million in prizes will be awarded.
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Four Harker seniors have been named semifinalists in the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search, the Society for Science announced Wednesday. The students and their projects are as follows:
Vineet Kosaraju: Rational RNA Riboswitch Design through a Massive Open Laboratory
Sophia Luo: Integrative Multi-Cohort Analysis of Preeclamptic Placenta Identifies Perturbation of the P53 Pathway, Similarity to Certain Cancer Subtypes and Clinically Relevant Drugs
Jonathan Ma: Genomics-Based Cancer Drug Response Prediction Through the Adaptive Elastic Net
Sadhika Malladi: Application of EMDomics to Identify Age-Associated Expression and Treatments in Cancer
More than 1,750 students from 512 high schools entered this year’s contest. Of those, 300 were selected as semifinalists and each received a $1,000 award. In addition, each student’s school also received $1,000. The 40 finalists, who will compete in Washington, D.C., will be announced on Jan. 20.
The San Jose Mercury News mentioned the four semifinalists and last year’s win by Harker grade Andrew Jin ’15 in their coverage of the contest.
Thanks to a recent lower school dress drive, the holiday season was made a little brighter for at-risk and underprivileged youth at the Starbird Youth Center in San Jose. The items collected became part of a larger donation of more than 500 gifts that were handed out to clients of the center.
“There were about seven bags of boys and girls party clothing donated,” recalled Tere Aceves, Harker’s director of event fundraising. Last month the lower school hosted a holiday cookie decorating event, at which parents were asked to bring in gently used children’s dress clothing for the drive. About 60 parents heeded the call for such items.
Harker parent Erin Vokey (Miles, grade 1) is the youth activities supervisor at the Starbird Youth Center and is in charge of the center’s day-to-day activities, as well as its literacy programs.
“We are an after-school program that works with at-risk and under-privileged youth. We help them by providing food, homework help and a safe place to go after school. We also do a program called The Good Choices, which is a basic moral guide that teaches them what are the right choices to make to lead a better life,” she said.
At the time of the dress drive, the center also had partnered with the Family Giving Tree to distribute gifts to clients and their families for its annual Christmas event, Vokey explained. “We set up a room where children picked out clothing from the holiday dress drive. This is the second year we have had the dresses there and it was a huge success. Fellow Harker parent Julie Carr (Aiden Harshman, grade 1) and her family volunteered to hand out all of the dresses to the youth in our community. It was an extremely heartwarming event,” recalled Vokey.
Another Harker parent, Stephanie Black (Chloe, grade 1), is the program director at the Starbird Youth Center. “Without her none of this would have been possible,” added Vokey.
Carr and her son (Aiden Harshman, grade 1) agreed that it was wonderful to see the joy in the kids’ faces when they got a beautiful dress, jacket or new shirt. “Stephanie, Erin and the entire staff at the center made it so easy for us to come in and volunteer. We are very grateful for the work they do and proud that we got to represent Harker’s philanthropy,” said Carr.
Carr noted that a fun, unexpected perk of being at the event was meeting the woman who does the voice of Bart Simpson, Nancy Cartwright, who was there to donate a pinball machine for the kids. “It was a Simpsons-themed machine and the kids loved it!” said Carr.
“There’s nothing more inspiring than seeing kids learn how to make good choices in life,” said Cartwright, noting that one of the reasons she wanted to achieve success in her own work was so she would have the means to help others.
Of his experience volunteering, Carr’s son, Aiden, reported that it was “really cool.” He said that there were lots of games to play with at the center and that he enjoyed seeing the kids get toys. “It made me feel good in my heart.”
The girls basketball team put up three huge wins last week as it defeated Mercy Burlingame, Crystal Springs Uplands and Pacific Collegiate School by an average margin of 40 points! Junior Jordan Thompson’s 28 points per game is still among the best in the CCS. The 13-3 girls team will travel to Immaculate Conception Academy on Wednesday.
Boys Basketball
After a tough league loss to Pinewood last week, the Harker boys team defeated Eastside Prep 64-53 on Thursday. Elijah Edgehill, grade 12, led the Eagles with 21 points. Cal-Hi Sports covered the game and you can see the highlights here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR_rKhcSWBk
The boys team plays tonight at Blackford at 7 p.m.
Boys Soccer
Last Monday, the boys varsity soccer team picked up its fourth win in a row as it defeated Crystal Springs Uplands 4-2. Omar Hamade, grade 12, had two goals, while Nick Acero and Sparsh Chauhan, both grade 10, each had one. Later in the week, the Eagles fell to Menlo 3-0. This Wednesday the team hosts Eastside Prep at 3 p.m. on Davis Field.
Girls Soccer
The girls Varsity soccer team dropped games to Sacred heart Prep and Castilleja last week. Lyndsey Mitchell, grade 11, scored the only goal for Harker. Come support the girls team as it takes on Notre Dame San Jose today on Davis Field at 3:30 p.m.
Wrestling
The Harker wrestling team traveled to Saratoga High last Thursday and, although they won five individual matches, the team lost 24-42. Kobe Howard, grade 9, and Davis Howard, grade 11, won by decision, and Diego Figueroa, grade 11, Anthony Contreras, grade 10, and Danny Reidenbach, grade 11, each won by fall. Later in the week at the Jim Root Tournament held at Prospect High, Davis Howard placed fifth in his weight class; he is currently ranked 19th in CCS in the 285-pound division.
MS Wrestling
Continuing his impressive run, Dezi Johnsen, grade 6, took home a first place trophy at the New Mexico National Wrestling Tournament in the 12-and-under, 130-pound division. Johnsen defeated wrestlers from New Mexico and Texas to earn the first place finish.
The middle school Wildlife SOS club, made up of students in grades 6 and 7, painted watercolor cards and made origami toys during club time, then sold them to parents during the parent-teacher conference. The cards and toys sold out in under an hour, and the group raised about $77 for Wildlife SOS, an organization that rescues and cares for abused elephants and other animals. Club members are continuing to make the popular watercolor cards and also will be making origami spinning tops, which they plan to sell at the next parent-teacher conference in the spring. Go Wildlife SOS!
The Harker Conservatory opened 2016 with its Student Directed Showcase, which took place at the Blackford Theater Jan. 8-9. One of the most rigorous courses in the performing arts program, the Student Directed Showcase puts four seniors each in charge of putting on a one-act play. In addition to directing the play, the students are tasked with handling every stage of its production, from casting to promotion to visual effects.
In the aptly named “The Internet is Distract – OH LOOK A KITTEN!” directed by Mary Najibi, a student struggled to divert her attention away from the Internet’s many distractions while finishing a paper. Rachel Renteria directed Bradley Hayward’s “Selfie,” a story about high school students dealing with mounting pressures as they near the end of their senior year. “Cheating Death,” directed by Janet Lee, took audiences to a mental hospital, where patients tried to outwit the angel of death in an effort to save their friend. M.C. Smitherman directed “Final Dress Rehearsal,” which followed the cast and crew of an amateur theater group as they attempted to save their flagging production of “Cinderella.”
“The most important lesson I learned while directing was learning how to be kind while also being assertive. Into the process, I really found got into the groove of being a director by clearly vocalizing when I wanted the actors to give more or try the scene a new way,” said Najibi, also noting that being a director was “such an amazing experience and I am so honored to have had such an opportunity.”