This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
In mid-June, 19 students and three teachers set off on a five-day backpacking adventure in Yosemite National Park, packing in their own supplies and making their own food.
Science teachers Ben Morgensen and Daniel Sommer, and math teacher Margaret Huntley, accompanied students on the trip, which began at Crane Flat Campground.
“The backpacking trip was incredible!” recalled Huntley. “We hiked to and camped at the truly amazing May Lake, with a pristine lake, snow-capped peaks and view out across Yosemite. We did a day hike to Mt. Hoffmann (10,856 ft.) then hiked to Murphy Creek and camped there for a night before hiking out and driving home. We had beautiful weather and a great mix of first-time and returning hikers, some sleeping in a tent for the first time and others taking on real leadership roles.”
After Crane Flat, the group drove to the May Lake Trailhead. “On the way … we watched the land unfold in front of us, with towering peaks jutting sharply into the deep blue sky and babbling brooks merrily cascading down deep gorges,” reminisced Andy Semenza, grade 9.
Once at the trailhead, it was a short hike up to May Lake through the alpine landscape. Upon their arrival at the lake beneath Mt. Hoffmann, they proceeded to set up camp and cook dinner.
“The need to purify all water instilled a greater appreciation for nature,” Semenza said. “Once we had finished our repast, we scrambled up a rock outcropping near the lake to watch a spectacular sunset and thunderstorm unfold over the great valley of Tuolumne Meadows and lightning strike the highest peaks of the region.”
The next morning, the students climbed Mt. Hoffman then descended to Murphy Creek where many of them fished for trout in the lake. That night, some of the group opted to spend the night in sleeping bags on the granite.
“Throughout that week, we learned many lessons only possible outside the confines of the classroom walls – from the crippling effects of altitude to the feeding practices of ospreys. However, we also had to cope with more psychological issues, like managing a good pace for a group or dealing with tent mates,” said Semenza.
This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Over the summer, seven Harker journalism students – chaperoned by journalism teacher Ellen Austin and librarian Lauri Vaughan – ventured to the Hawaiian island of Maui to bolster their skill sets in preparation for the 2014-15 school year.
“The goal of the trip was to realize what we needed to improve upon and learn the steps to take in order to get where we wanted to be,” said journalism student Jacqui Villarreal, grade 12. During the trip, the yearbook staff had the honor of working with Laura Parker and Tina Cleavelin of Jostens, the company that prints the yearbook. “Not only did they open our eyes about what we could do differently, they also created fun for us to have after a six-hour work session,” Villarreal recalled.
Villarreal said the trip inspired them to change the design principles and work flow in the journalism department.
This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
In June, more than a dozen upper school students, accompanied by upper school science teachers Anita Chetty and Mike Pistacchi, embarked on an eye-opening trip to Tanzania.
Students had amazing interactions with some of Tanzania’s tribal people. The Hadzabe people are the oldest hunter-gatherer tribe. They speak with clicks and are entirely unfamiliar with cities or cars. The tribe welcomed the students to their village, sharing stories about their lives and culture. The chief of the tribe taught the students how to build a fire and to use a bow and arrow before taking them on a two-hour hunting excursion through the wilderness. Before parting ways with the Hadzabe, the group delivered medical and diagnostic equipment that they had raised money to purchase.
During their visit with the Maasai village of Esilalei, the students ran an eye clinic, fitting and delivering 50 pairs of glasses that they had collected from Harker community donations, in addition to donating 15 goats. Harker’s Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (WiSTEM) organization also donated uniforms and book bags for 40 children, enabling them to attend school.
While on safari through Tanzania’s Tarangire and Serengeti national parks and the Ngorogoro Crater, the students had the rare opportunity to see the Big Five over two separate days: elephant, rhino, leopard, lion and Cape buffalo. Students also saw a cheetah stalk, chase and kill a gazelle. During a Jeep tour of Tarangire National Park, the students observed impalas, elephants and a herd of more than 500 buffalo. At one point, several female and baby elephants wandered to within 20 feet of the group, who gladly took pictures.
This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Middle school art teacher Elizabeth Saltos headed to Australia this past summer for Harker’s annual teacher exchange with St. Stephen’s College, a PK-12 school located on the Gold Coast in the Australian province of Queensland. Her trip started in Sydney, where she visited the Royal Botanic Gardens, rode the Manly Ferry for a scenic view of the city and went kayak- ing at Sydney Harbor. Later, she traveled to Cairns to go snorkeling and kayaking at the famous Great Barrier Reef, calling the experience “a big bucket list highlight.”
After visiting Michaelmas Cay and Fitzroy Island, Saltos boarded a plane to Brisbane and rode a train to the Gold Coast suburb of Coomera. There, she stayed at the home of St. Stephen’s College headmaster Jamie Dorrington.
During her time teaching at St. Stephen’s, Saltos worked in the school’s visual arts department, teaching blind modeling in clay, doing clay relief projects and teaching grade 10 students about cubist perspective. She also gave presentations on her own work to grades 11 and 12, and collaborated with students of St. Stephen’s art department chair, Samantha Reynolds, to create a silk-screen.
Saltos said that she found the grading process at Australian schools to be very unique. “The school awards a grade and then the students submit their work to a panel of educators statewide and these professionals award a grade,” she said. “The two grades are then averaged and this is the grade looked at for entrance into university.”
This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Harker once again invited Bay Area educators to the upper school campus for the Harker Teacher Institute on June 7. Celebrating its 10th year, the event featured presentations by 17 Harker faculty members, who gave workshops on various ways to improve the learning experience in classrooms. It was also sponsored by the Silicon Valley affiliate of Computer Using Educators, an organization dedicated to the innovative use of technology in education.
The workshops explored many different tools and techniques. For example, lower school math teacher Eileen Schick’s presentation on Singapore model drawing demonstrated a visual method of solving word problems. Meanwhile, lower school English teacher Ann Smitherman demonstrated how using questions in feedback helps students better internalize the feedback they receive, and showed her use of comments in Google Docs to achieve this goal.
For his workshop on project-based learning, Juston Glass, business and entrepreneurship teacher, had attendees break off into groups and build structures using Tinkertoys to show how classroom projects can engage students and help them become more invested in the learning process.
Diane Main, the upper school’s learning, innovation and design director, showed how MinecraftEdu – an educational version of the popular computer game Minecraft – can be used to create classroom environments in which students learn how to work together to solve problems.
This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Since their foundings in 2009 and 2011, respectively, the John Near history endowment and the Mitra humanities endowment have become symbols of the Harker community’s dedication to helping students pursue a broad array of interests. The endowments have funded 21 meticulously researched historical analyses to date.
Established after the 2009 passing of beloved history teacher John Near and funded by his parents, Jim and Pat Near, The John Near Excellence in History Education Endowment echoes Near’s passion for history education. In addition to funding the continued development of the John Near Resource Center, the endowment provides students with opportunities to do high-level academic research on their chosen historical topics.
Two years later, Harker parents Samir and Sundari Mitra (Sachin ‘10; Shivani ‘13) established The Mitra Family Endowment for the Humanities, a $100,000 fund that further expands research opportunities into areas such as philosophy, languages and the arts. This endowment exemplifies the Mitras’ “whole mission” philosophy, which emphasizes not just mathematical and scientific know-how but also the ability to know what people need, “so that you can create something to help make the world a better place,” said Joe Rosenthal, executive director of advancement.
Each year, Harker seniors submit proposals on topics in history and the humanities that they would like to explore. Those chosen to receive Near and Mitra grants are then assigned a faculty mentor and spend the next year researching and writing their papers. Their journeys often lead to fascinating discoveries. Shivani Mitra, one of the first Mitra scholars, traveled to Mexico City to speak with members of Frida Kahlo’s family for her project on the life and impact of the legendary painter and feminist icon. She also unearthed archival photos that provided further insight into Kahlo’s life and how it influenced her work.
“We had so much fun,” said history department chair Donna Gilbert, who mentored Mitra during her research. “Neither of us had seen any of those archival photographs before.”
Gilbert and Library Director Sue Smith, who evaluate and approve student proposals for the grants, admitted to trepidation about the programs upon their initial launch. “That first year, we kind of held our breath; we weren’t sure if anyone was even going to want to do it,” Gilbert said.
“Are they going to line up to do independent research in their senior year that’s going to take hours and hours of their time?” Smith remembered asking at the time.
Their concerns were allayed both by the response to the grant programs, which attracted dozens of applicants this past school year, and the quality of the resulting papers. Students have begun asking about the grants as early as grade 9, “and not just as a resume builder, but with a genuine interest in a topic,” Gilbert said.
The grant programs also have acted as a source of professional development for the faculty mentors, who often find themselves caught up in the subjects that the students are studying. “We’re all intellectually interested ourselves,” Smith said. “I’ve watched mentors do research simultaneously with the kids to stay one step ahead so that they can help them.”
Just this summer, Smith bumped into Apoorva Rangan, grade 12 and one of this year’s Near scholars, and found herself in a conversation about Rangan’s research on news coverage of the Vietnam War and the resulting tension between news media and the federal government. The discussion turned to how Rangan planned to focus her project after learning how the Freedom of Information Act affected television coverage of the war. “She’s seeing things in history colliding and questioning what affected what,” Smith said. “Those kinds of things sustain those of us in education for weeks at a time.”
For Rangan, the importance of the Near and Mitra grants lies in how they reinforce Harker’s mission to help students discover and foster their love for any topic. “The grants haven’t just enhanced learning opportunities for the scholars,” Rangan said. “They’ve helped bring balance to the entire student body. They’ve helped emphasize to students that you can make any subject as rigorous as you want it to be.”
The grants also provide additional motivation for students to excel in social studies and the humanities, something to which Rangan can personally attest. “When I was thinking about proposal topics for the grant, I found myself more involved and engaged in my history classes,” she said.
In their proposals, students frequently cite work they have done in previous years, Smith said. “Oftentimes they provide a resume in their application for the grant,” she said. “The point is that they see our research scope and sequence in the history department as preparation.”
The effort and passion that goes into these projects also can have lasting effects that extend far beyond the students’ high school careers. While working on her paper about the impact of the feminist and civil rights movements on the disability rights movement of the 1960s and ’70s, Near scholar Zina Jawadi ’13, who is hearing impaired, also began devising a plan for how to improve the lives of people with disabilities, particularly the removal of barriers to educational opportunities.
For Jawadi, one of the greatest benefits of being a Near scholar was the mentorship she received from Smith and history teacher Ruth Meyer, both of whom offered advice on how to create a paper that would bolster her long-term goals. “Dr. Meyer and Ms. Smith mentioned in my first meeting in senior year that I should focus on the history of the disability rights movement rather than the policy change,” she said.
“Dr. Meyer then explained that the policy change paper could have more of an impact in the real world, if I published [it] in a few years, once I have established my advocacy work, and once I have solidified my [knowledge of the] historical background of the disability rights movement.”
Though they are happy with the grant programs as they currently exist, Gilbert and Smith have discussed some possible future improvements. Gilbert would like to see Near and Mitra scholars share and discuss their work with the community more often, hoping that “students will see research not necessarily as a burden or as … just another assignment that they have to check off, but [as] transformative.”
Another possibility is adding more multimedia elements, such as links to videos or sounds embedded into the electronic versions of the papers. “When somebody interviews Frida Kahlo’s family, it would be fabulous to be able to have a video clip embedded in the paper,” Smith said.
Above all, Gilbert and Smith hope that the grants continue in their mission to offer research opportunities to students who wish to explore the subjects they love.
“I feel like we are so in touch with the kids’ interests and can support them in this program,” Smith said. “This is the ultimate individualized learning program.”
Mitra and Near Scholar papers have all been summarized and the summaries can be found in Harker News at news. harker.org; search “endowment.” The papers themselves can be found on our website at http://library.harker.org/nearmitra.
This year’s Harker Homecoming was another fun-filled event for the entire community. On an unseasonably hot fall afternoon, students, parents, faculty, staff and alumni arrived at the upper school campus in droves to socialize, enjoy fresh food prepared by the Harker kitchen staff, watch performances by talented Harker students and root for the Eagles. The bounce houses set up on Rosenthal Field were again a popular attraction for the younger attendees, while alumni gathered to catch up and reminisce. Prior to the game, the Eaglets fly-by and performances by the Junior Cheerleaders and Varsity Dance Team got the crowd amped. The Harker Pep Band kept the crowd moving throughout the evening.
Halftime opened with a performance by the Harker cheer squad, after which the Class of 2015 defeated grade 11 to take first place in the tug-of-war. Grades 9 and 10 faced off for third-place in the competition, with the sophomores coming away victorious. The crowd then greeted this year’s Homecoming Court, and applauded as senior siblings Shiki and Shreya Dixit were named Homecoming King and Queen. Topping it all off was a 51-6 Harker Eagles win over visitors Ribet Academy. Check out the video of the 2014 Harker Homecoming!
This article was originally published in the fall 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Good morning. I would like to welcome the classes of 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015 to the 2014 matriculation ceremony. Matriculation is a ceremony initiated with the first class of the Harker upper school, the Class of 2002. During this ceremony new students to the upper school take an oath promising to follow the Honor Code, a document written by students in the early years of the Harker upper school and updated periodically. The Honor Code outlines how students as a community wish to live together and wish to be treated by each other. Honesty and respect, for instance, are important tenets of the Honor Code.
Each year I begin matriculation with an aspiration I have for the students for the school year. Because I have basically invited myself to speak at both matriculation and graduation, and I have accepted my own invitation, I try to confine my remarks to one page of single- space, size-12 font. I am adapting my aspiration for you this year from a TED talk given by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of “Thinking Fast and Slow.” Kahneman begins his TED talk by pointing out that studies of happiness are often confused by a lack of clarity around which self’s happiness we are discussing, the “experiencing self” or the “remembering self.”
What are the experiencing and remembering selves? According to Kahneman, the experiencing self is the self who lives his life from moment to moment; the remembering self is the self who thinks about his life. The experiencing self is the self the doctor inquires about when he pokes you and asks, “Does this hurt?” The remembering self is the self he inquires about when he asks how you have been feeling over the last few weeks. If you go on vacation, the self who is enjoying each moment is the experiencing self; the self who is planning the vacation beforehand and recalling it fondly while looking at pictures afterward is the remembering self. The experiencing self is your life and the remembering self thinks about your life. What is my hope for you this year? My hope for you this year is that you achieve a healthy balance between your experiencing self and your remembering self.
We need both selves. If we only had the experiencing self, we would live like a piece of music in which each note has no relation to the note that went before or the note that comes after. I think we all know people like this, and in some ways kids live more as an experiencing self. We need the remembering self to have what the philosopher Alan Watts calls “resonance.” It isn’t much good to be happy unless you know you are happy. Memory and metacognition are forms of feedback that give life resonance, just as good acoustical feedback gives our voice resonance. The remembering self is a kind of a neurological echo.
However, we can live under the tyranny of the remembering self, especially in high school. The remembering self compares with others, makes judgments, sets expectations and plans. The remembering self, when hyperactive, can create the same kind of zaniness that occurs when we have too much feedback, like when a cave produces too much echo or when we are overthinking a performance. Here is one of Alan Watts’ favorite limericks:
“There once was a man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, yet what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.”
Kahneman asks what kind of vacation you would choose if you could take no pictures and your memory would be wiped upon return? High school is a time for planning and preparing, but what kind of life would you plan if your experiencing self, not your remembering self, were choosing? Too often we choose a path based on the remembering self’s ideas, not the experiencing self’s intuition. Whichever path you choose, hopefully your experiencing self will have some say and will be there to experience the joy of your flourishing.Living too much with the remembering self can remove us from the life all around us. John Lennon sang in his song “Beautiful Boy,” “Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.” By achieving the right balance between the experiencing and remembering selves, we hope that you will find the life that is waiting for you, both this year and beyond. Thank you.
Representatives from Harker joined parents, students, educators and the general public at Stanford University for an engaging discussion about how to help students balance academic achievement with personal well-being.
The Sept. 26 event was part of a larger conference called “Success By Design: Is It Possible?” sponsored by Challenge Success, a nonprofit group associated with Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. Held in the university’s Memorial Auditorium, it featured Challenge Success co-founders Denise Pope and Madeline Levine.
Other speakers included Wendy Mogel, clinical psychologist and author of New York Times bestselling book “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” (and follow-up book “The Blessing of a B Minus”), and Dave Evans, a lecturer in Stanford’s product design program and co-founder of Electronic Arts.
Two Harker upper school students, Austin Lai, grade 12, and Naomi Molin, grade 11, also spoke at the event, which Challenge Success called its “biggest parent education event of the year.”
“Austin and Naomi spoke alongside some of the most well-respected educational authors, parental experts and voices on topics related to student wellness. Austin read his compelling personal narrative, then Naomi informed the packed audience about some of the recent efforts Harker made to further the engagement and wellness of our student body,” reported Jennifer Gargano, assistant head of school, academic affairs.
The annual event marked 11 years that Challenge Success educators have collaborated with more than 100 schools. Participants from almost 30 middle school and high schools gathered for the conference.
“Throughout the conference, when I mentioned I was from Harker, I consistently heard how great our students are. I know many were impressed by the maturity of both Austin and Naomi,” said Gargano.
Five middle school students successfully auditioned for spots in the Stanford Jazz Workshop Giant Steps All-Star Band. Students who were accepted are flutist Donna Boucher and double bassist Connie Xu, both grade 8, saxophonist Grant Miner, grade 7, and tenor saxophonist Paul Kratter and guitarist Arushi Saxena, both grade 6.
In addition, double bassist Anika Fuloria and trumpeter Leland Rossi, both grade 6, received recognition for their abilities on their respective instruments.
The band comprises 20 members, who were judged on such qualities as musicianship, improvisational ability, music theory knowledge and technique. Band members will rehearse once a week in preparation for a concert that will take place at Stanford University in December.