This article originally appeared in the fall 2015 Harker Quarterly.
Once again, California was the classroom for students on the annual summer middle school backpacking trip. Soon after school let out, 16 students, accompanied by several teachers, headed off for a five-day trek through the Jackass Lakes region, just south of Yosemite National Park.
“Students carried all their own food, cooked all their own food, and learned to become independent in a new environment through teamwork, problem-solving, and math skills,” recalled middle school science teacher Daniel Sommer.
Sommer, along with fellow science teacher Ben Morgensen and middle school math teacher Margaret Huntley, accompanied the students on their wilderness adventure.
The trip was marked by beautiful weather and a great mix of first-time and returning hikers, some sleeping in a tent for the very first time and others taking on real leadership roles. All of the students took turns setting up camp and cooking dinner. They also learned how to catch fish in the lake and purify all their water.
Alex Rule, grade 9, has gone on the trip for the past few years. “The backpacking trip was a mixture of exhilaration, challenge and friendship. We were faced with some very difficult hikes, but we pushed each other along and achieved some of the greatest accomplishments of our lives. The views were breathtaking … but just as enjoyable as appreciating the magnificent nature was creating relationships with the other backpackers. I found myself really loving their personalities, and I could not have made it as far as I did without them,” he said.
The middle school backpacking trip was a casual, optional outdoor travel opportunity for students. This fall, many middle school students will participate in exciting, weeklong class trips, also providing hands-on learning outside the classroom. Last year, grade 6 students visited the Santa Cruz Mountains; grade 7 toured national parks around the Southwest; and grade 8 journeyed to Washington, D.C.
“Overall, my three years doing the [backpacking] trip have created some of the best weeks of my life, and I genuinely feel like other people interested in the trip will feel the same way if they decide to come along!” said Rule.
This article originally appeared in the fall 2015 Harker Quarterly.
In July, with temperatures rising in California, 12 Harker students traveled to the Arctic for a special two-week research expedition focused on environmental issues including the impact of global warming. After 28 hours of travel, the crew landed in Oslo, Norway, where they visited Frogner Park and the Fram Museum, where Norway’s first ship built for polar research is kept. “We ran around the ship looking at every secret room, staircase or tool,” wrote Sharanya Balaji, grade 12, in her blog of the expedition. “We even enacted scenes from ‘Titanic’ and pretended to bail buckets of water out of the ship. It was an amazing end to our day.”
The next day was also filled with travel as the students made their way to the town of Longyearbyen, where they enjoyed lunch before boarding their cruise ship, “Le Boreal.” After a good night’s sleep, the students awoke to a great breakfast and were briefed on the day’s activities. They later landed on the shores of Isfjorden and took in the lay of the land, wandering its hills and grabbing many photos of the local flora and fauna. Following lunch, they journeyed to Poolepynten to see the many walruses that live there.
Later on the trip, the students visited the Andoyane Islands, where they received a sobering reminder of one of many ongoing environmental issues. As they walked on to the beach, “we noticed loads and loads of plastic on the ground, which really disturbed us,” said Balaji. They promptly began picking up the trash on the beach, filling nine bags weighing a total of 125 pounds. Afterward they visited Monacobreen, a large glacier that has retreated in recent years due to climate change. “Every so often, you would hear a thunderous booming sound which signified the carving of the glacier,” Balaji said. “Watching that was nothing but surreal.”
More travel was in store for the next couple of days, as the group made its way toward Greenland. Unfortunately, thick ice surrounding the island made it impossible to land, and the students were disappointed to learn that the entire Greenland portion of the expedition would have to be canceled.
The group finally reached the “top of the world” the next day at the island of Grimsey, located off the coast of Iceland, where they posed for pictures next to a signpost that pointed to various major cities and took in the breathtaking view from the island’s cliffs. They spent the next day sightseeing in Iceland, getting close to a large waterfall, buying souvenirs and visiting the Devil’s Kitchen, a park with geysers spewing sulfuric acid.
For the final excursion, the students went to Flatey Island, which is inhabited by only six people. Here, the students presented the results of the research they had conducted over the course of the expedition. After they finished, the students were treated to a 17-minute slide show recapping their travels and made the most of their remaining time in Iceland by viewing its famous lava trails and visiting a shark museum.
This article originally appeared in the fall 2015 Harker Quarterly.
Each year, faculty members participate in Harker’s learning, innovation and design (LID) department’s grants program, in which they spend their summers acquiring new skills to enhance their teaching methods. Formerly known as tech grants, many of these projects involve integrating technology into curricula.
Middle school English teacher Henry Cuningham had wanted to integrate an electronic polling system known as Clickers, but found it prohibitively expensive. Although a similar functionality could be found on student laptops, “I didn’t want to create another situation where I am forced to police student usage of laptops,” Cuningham said. “I do that enough already.”
Cuningham then discovered Plickers, a system that performs a function similar to Clickers, but without the need for students to use their own devices. Students simply hold up cards indicating their answers and the teacher records them using a smartphone or tablet camera. Cards are designed to ensure that each student can answer honestly without other students knowing each other’s answers. Moreover, it’s free. “It will be useful in breaking up a class with a short poll to see whether students understand taught material,” Cuningham said. “Plickers should also help to prime discussion.”
Students in Catherine Hsieh’s grade 5 science class have been greatly enjoying their Chromebooks, and Hsieh wanted to leverage this enthusiasm to improve their classroom experiences. “For my project, I explored different Web-based applications (Google Forms, Flubaroo, Pear Deck, EDpuzzle, Plickers) that can be used to create formative assessments,” she said. “The applications work as student response systems so that every student is engaged and can participate in the lesson.” They also provide instant feedback to the students and the teacher, allowing both to gauge how well they comprehend the material.
These advantages also will help Hsieh pace the class more appropriately so that the maximum number of students can benefit. “This would allow me to get a better sense of what works best for each group since I will be able to get feedback from all of the kids, not just the more vocal ones,” she said. It also helps students become more self-sufficient by enabling them to assess their own grasp of the material, and any topics they need to review can be easily revisited.
In keeping with the technology-based theme of the LID grants program, each participating teacher created short YouTube videos summarizing their projects and the benefits for students. These videos were shown at the faculty welcome meeting in mid-August.
This article originally appeared in the fall 2015 Harker Quarterly.
Wrestling
Held in the middle school gym, Harker’s wrestling camp was staffed by experienced and dedicated coaches who taught camp attendees new moves and proper technique. A notable returning mentor was Anthony Robles, the 2011 NCAA national champion, who was awarded an ESPY for Best Male Athlete with a Disability. He was a source of inspiration for many students at the camp. “Working with [Robles] one-on-one was an honor,” said Arianna Pinella, a junior at Andrew Hill High School. “He told me the little mistakes that could get better.”
The camp also gave Pinella an opportunity to learn new moves to expand her repertoire as a competitive wrestler. “I really like meeting the new coaches, learning the new moves, putting my name out there and just wanting to get better,” she said.
Camp directors Karriem Stinson – who is also Harker’s wrestling coach – and Shaun Henebry designed the wrestling camp to appeal to lovers of the sport. This year, each camp day was broken into three sessions. The morning session focused on technical aspects of the sport, “so we’ll show them a couple of moves, we’ll run through, do a lot of technical stuff,” Stinson explained. In the second session, the coaches reviewed principles and techniques, and then taught additional techniques. The afternoon portion of the camp consisted primarily of live wrestling and practice.
Veronica Capellino, a junior at Prospect High School, had previously attended another Harker off-season camp and enjoyed the coaching so much that she returned this summer. “They just made me feel more confident about everything I was doing,” she said. “Just in these last couple of days, I feel like I’ve gotten so much better.”
TRX
Student athletes seeking to improve their overall fitness headed to the summer TRX suspension training camp, where they learned new fitness techniques to help them prepare for the upcoming sports season. The TRX system was developed by Navy SEALs to be highly customizable and portable, using the trainer’s body weight to build strength and endurance.
“TRX camp was different this year because we had a cardio room and a lot of new workout equipment,” said Karriem Stinson, camp director and certified TRX training coach. “The students used battle ropes and speed harnesses to improve their overall speed.”
Each day of the camp consisted of a 15-minute warmup session, after which campers split into two groups – one working on cardio and the other starting on the TRX equipment. “We would rotate each group so that both got to work in both rooms,” Stinson said. “We also used a vertex machine to test their vertical [strength] and used the climbing rope to help their overall upper body strength.”
Stinson has received a positive reaction from the camp, and said he will be working with the Harker physical education department to bring TRX to more students. “I felt many got stronger this summer,” he said, “and I have already received emails asking if we will be doing TRX during the school year.”
Basketball
Harker’s basketball camp, held in late June in the middle school gym, emphasized the fundamentals of the one of the world’s most popular sports. This year, the camp was held in two daily sessions: a morning session for boys and a coed afternoon session. Students learned and practiced essential skills such as dribbling, passing, ball handling and shooting.
Camp attendees benefited from the instruction of John “Sarge” Siers, a veteran teacher and coach of more than 30 years. A longtime friend of Butch Keller, upper school head and also a successful basketball coach, Siers’ experience includes coaching at two NCAA Final Fours, coaching 32 players to Division I scholarships and working with many NBA players. His coaching philosophy is to encourage his students to have fun so that they will be more open to learning. Improving fundamental skills, he believes, helps the young athletes get more enjoyment out of playing.
Volleyball
Volleyball enthusiasts of varying skill levels in grades 4-9 attended the summer volleyball camp to improve their game and learn new skills. Top-level instruction helped students gain the edge they need in the fall sports season. Camp director Vonda Reid, a club director for the Stingray Volleyball Club and a coach at Harker for more than 15 years, lent her years of expertise to help the attendees get the most out of their week at the camp.
As always, fun was a top priority, with students grouped by age and skill levels. Students began every day with a dynamic warmup period that included stretches and ball control Photo by Stefan Armijo drills. Afterward, they rotated to stations set up to train individual skills such as passing, setting, hitting and serving. Students also worked on team formations and spent much of their time playing live games, a favorite activity among campers.
Soccer
One of Harker’s most popular summer offerings, the soccer camp covered two campuses and provided players of many skill levels with a wide variety of exercises and activities. Players ages 6-9 attended camp at the middle school campus, while players ages 10- 16 attended camp at the upper school.
Camp director Shaun Tsakiris, a longtime Harker soccer coach who has spent years building the camp, worked to create a fun and challenging experience for all participants. Coaches from the De Anza Force soccer club were on hand to work individually with players as they honed their skills and developed new ones.
A typical day at the soccer camp started with a warmup that included agility and psychomotor training, before moving on to individual skill stations, such passing, dribbling and the various elements of shooting. The soccer ball is incorporated into exercises whenever possible. Other activities included futsal (indoor soccer), practicing one-on-one situations and game play.
Water Polo
Warm summer weather provided the perfect environment for this year’s water polo camp, which emphasized key fundamental skills of this long-running Olympic sport, such as eggbeater kicking, passing and shooting.
Because many of the camp’s attendees were new to the sport, teaching the fundamentals was crucial. The camp was run by two water polo veterans: Harker water polo coach Allie Lamb has more than 15 years of experience with the sport, playing with top volleyball coaches such as Rich Corso and Ricardo Azevedo. Co-director Ted Ujifusa started playing water polo in the 1960s and was a member of the first University of California, Berkeley team to win an NCAA championship.
Aside from learning rudimentary skills, the campers had fun playing informal pickup games and spending time in the water as a respite from the summer heat.
Swim School
Casual swimmers and enthusiasts both attended Harker’s summer swim school, held from mid-June to early August at the upper school’s Singh Aquatic Center. Staffed with qualified and attentive instructors, the swim school offered lessons to swimmers of virtually every skill level, both individually and in groups. Alex Stoeb, a student at Millbrook Elementary School, found the swim school beneficial in refreshing his knowledge of key swimming skills. “I kind of forgot everything,” he said, “so I wanted to come back and re-learn it again.” He also enjoyed receiving training in freestyle swimming and backstroke.
This article originally appeared in the fall 2015 Harker Quarterly. Read the full, multimedia version, including two video reports, at http://longform.harker.org/?p=6!
It’s opening night of the spring musical, and director Laura Lang-Ree already has her cast dreaming of Scotland, four months away. “You can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like,”she imparts to the students, who are probably trying anyway as they stand shoulder-to-shoulder, humming in unison. She circles the cast, filling their heads with visions of the weeks leading up to the premiere, of traveling up and down Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, of the spectacle of Festival Fringe, the humming growing in volume.
“1! 2! 3!” The room erupts, and the members of the cast take their places. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the oldest festival of its kind, a city-wide event with thousands of shows taking place in hundreds of venues. It began in 1947 when eight alternative theater companies arrived at the Edinburgh International Festival to perform for the large crowds that had assembled in the city. Several decades later, it is now the world’s largest arts festival, spanning weeks and offering space for nearly every kind of performer. “It’s just mindblowing, the innovation and the quality of work that happens at the Fringe,” said Lang-Ree.
Harker’s participation in Fringe dates back to 2007, when the now-defunct American Musical Theatre of San Jose saw the Harker Conservatory production of “Urinetown” and nominated it for consideration by the American High School Theater Festival. After a lengthy adjudication process and a memorable first year at Fringe, Lang-Ree decided to try to attend every four years, provided Harker was one of the selected schools. The Conservatory took “Pippin” to the festival in 2011.
Attending the Fringe is like no other experience for our students, Lang-Ree said. There’s “a big part of being an artist that people underestimate: observation. One of the main ways that we grow [as artists] is by observing and learning and then trying it for ourselves.”
Putting on a show at Fringe can be tricky. To make room for the thousands of performances at the festival, each group has a total of two hours to set up, do the show and tear down to make room for the next performer. In anticipation, veteran set designer Paul Vallerga worked tirelessly to prepare sets and props that were ready for travel and easy to put in place, while also selling the atmosphere of the production.
“It’s all going to be in such a whirlwind,” Caroline Howells ’15, who played Cinderella, predicted when rehearsals began. “I imagine that we’ll get on stage and before we know it, it will be over.”
“Into the Woods” inspired extraordinary excitement in this cast and crew. Stephen Sondheim’s famously rich and challenging score and thematic complexity has achieved legendary status in the nearly 30 years since the musical premiered. “Musically, it’s very sophisticated,” said music director Catherine Snider. “So there’s always a little bit of extra-special care that needs to go into preparing a musical when the music is simply so difficult to learn.”
Sondheim devised subtle musical motifs for each of the story’s rich assortment of fairy tale characters, all searching for their own happily-ever-afters.
Sondheim’s music is couched in a story that puts fairy tale characters into situations that contort their (and “the audience’s) preconceptions about supposedly happy endings, daring to ask what happens when people get what they think they want. Act 1 concludes with what most would deem a happy ending, but things change in Act 2.
“‘Into the Woods’ explores what happens after the happily-ever-after, when our wishes aren’t quite what we thought and what we wanted kind of falls apart,” Snider said.
It’s a lot for actors to learn and digest, but it makes for a musical that is rewarding to perform, as well as witness. “Usually in a musical, maybe the music will be harder or the dance might be harder, one element might be more difficult than the others, but for ‘Into the Woods’ it was the combination of the acting and the singing that was at a really, really high level,” said Lang-Ree. “So that’s what made it unique.”
More about Harker’s appearance at Fringe – including the street performances, the lightning-quick setup and teardown, the exciting adventures in Scotland – can be found in the full media-rich feature story, now online at news.harker.org; search on “Into the Fringe.”
This article originally appeared in the fall 2015 Harker Quarterly.
My first boss in education, a middle school principal in the Hayward public school system, used to flit around campus on the first day of school saying that when he stopped getting first-day butterflies, he would leave education. I think this “tummy check” is good for educators.
The beginning of the school year after a long summer is a time of possibility, a time of excitement. Friends, teachers, students, parents all reunite, coming together toward the common purpose of bringing out the best in the children.
Schools are a unique mix of “now” and “forever.” We want students and teachers to have as rich an experience as possible, to focus on the process, the journey, the “now”; yet we are all preparing for the future, to help students take their deep learning and make a meaningful impact on the world to, in the words of Henry Adams, “affect eternity.”
At the beginning and end of summers, I often wonder what happened to the year-round school trend. Summer is still here, even though, as Time pointed out in its recent article “Who Killed Summer Vacation?” summer feels shorter to all of us. Some schools across the country have adopted a year-round schedule with intermittent breaks, but the trend hasn’t seemed to sweep the educational system as anticipated. There are plenty of schools with a traditional calendar that includes vacations.
There may be many reasons why this is the case – an entrenched summer programs industry, family vacations, school budgets – but regardless of the reasons for summer’s persistence, there remain, I believe, cognitive benefits from the break summer provides. We now understand that much learning is consolidated during sleep; that time away from the grind can bring fresh insight; that top athletes cycle their training in peaks and valleys to allow the body to heal from exertion.
There are two types of learning, and we hope our children experience both: cumulative and transformational. Cumulative learning is the most familiar: we learn the events that led up to the Civil War, the grammatical components of a foreign language, the steps in a geometry proof, the solubility table. Transformational learning is when the learner doesn’t just accumulate knowledge but becomes a different learner altogether.
In transformational learning, perhaps the student falls in love with a subject; has an insight into an historical event or a scientific phenomenon; learns how to learn; takes ownership of his or her studies; sees the connections between two disciplines; discovers what he or she wants to study in college. Both cumulative and transformational learning are necessary, but cumulative learning is a step on the student’s journey while transformational learning is a leap.
So the opening of the new school year – after a long or short summer – is a magical time, an exhilarating time, a time of possible transformation. No one can predict when a child will hit a growth spurt, either physically or cognitively or otherwise, but we can nurture, like a garden, the conditions for growth. We want for our children the best in learning and growth, and we hope for them, as we do our educators, the butterflies that this time of year brings.
Each year, as part of a long-running reciprocal exchange program, Harker’s global education department hosts a visiting teacher from the World Foreign Language Middle School (WFLMS) in Shanghai.
This year, from Sept.12-25, students and faculty warmly welcomed Ye Wang (who goes by the English nickname Athena). Wang is an upper school biology teacher at WFLMS, Harker’s sister school in China.
She said she greatly enjoyed her very first visit to the United States, where she spent time observing and teaching science classes at Harker’s lower, middle and upper schools.
“Athena was thrilled by all the science labs she visited and the incredible conversations with students she had,” reported Jennifer Walrod, Harker’s director of global education.
Wang shared that she was most impressed by all the “nice people” she met. “Teachers were kind, nice, patient and helpful. Students were polite, diligent and creative,” she recalled.
Wang noted many similarities between the way Harker and WFLMS teach science – from the text-based content to the basic lab experiments. However, she added, what set Harker apart were the added research classes, field trips, and opportunities to learn from the experiences of area universities and professors.
“They all provide unlimited opportunities for the students to discover, investigate and research based on books … and also beyond books,” she explained.
Established in 1996, WFLMS is located in the southwest part of the Xuhui District in Shanghai, an area regarded as an important educational location. For many years, Harker has had both a student and teacher exchange program with WFLMS as part of its ongoing effort to build progressive academic and cultural relationships that prepare students to become global citizens.
“I appreciated everything, everyone I met. I hope our sister school program and friendship can last forever!” enthused Wang.
Late next month, four Harker students will head to Grand Ole Opry in Nashville to perform with the All-National Honor Choir. Sahana Narayanan and Gurutam Thockchom, both grade 12, Ashwin Rao, grade 11, and Krishna Bheda, grade 10, were chosen by the National Association for Music Education (NAfME) after a nationwide audition process. They will perform in a 350-person ensemble featuring singers from all over the country and those residing overseas in military base schools. Aside from Harker, only two other schools have four or more singers in the ensemble, and Harker’s students account for four of the nine singers from California.
In June, grade 11 students Riya Chandra, Alex Mo, Eddie Shiang and Haley Tran attended the Hugh O’Brian Youth (HOBY) Leadership Seminar. Each year, rising high school juniors are nominated by their schools to represent their classes. These representatives then meet at HOBY events to build leadership skills through various activities and lectures. “The environment is inspiring, the people are brilliant and the experience is life changing,” said Mo. Also at the event was Mary Najibi, grade 12, who was volunteering at the event as a junior crew member after attending last year.
Conference activities included bonding cheers, games, talks by motivational speakers and idea sharing among attendees. “One that stuck out to me was when we were challenged as a group to build a society based on the materials they gave us,” Chandra said. “The point of the game was to demonstrate the hardships of some societies with racism and other forms of obstacles.”
The experience made a lasting impression on the students, who in addition to bolstering their leadership abilities, forged new friendships. “I made tons of friends and we even still keep in touch through social media. It’s amazing that just in three days, I formed such amazing friendships!” Chandra exclaimed.
“In the few days that I got to meet these students, I can honestly say that they have changed my life,” Mo said.
Students were all over the place, checking lights, testing sound, practicing bows and curtsies, making last-second adjustments to their pitch and phrasing. It was an April afternoon and the cast and crew of the upper school 2015 spring musical “Into the Woods” were moving restlessly about Blackford Theater. In just over an hour, they would finally play to an audience after months of preparation. Yet this was not so much the end of their effort as the beginning of another, as in a couple months they would be in the thick of the world’s largest arts festival. (continued)