This story recently appeared in the winter 2012 edition of Harker Quarterly.
This past fall, The Harker School and its Board of Trustees hosted an elegant evening reception honoring the Board of Fellows. Held in the historic Saratoga residence of John and Michelle Keller (Devin, grade 5; Haley, grade 7; Johnathon, grade 9; Michael ‘07), the Oct. 2 gathering heralded the first official meeting of the Board of Fellows.
The Harker Board of Fellows convenes twice a year for official gatherings where they discuss important initiatives and topics relevant to Harker.
The Board of Fellows is chaired by Albert “Chip” Zecher ’79, Harker alumnus and trustee. Serving on Harker’s Board of Fellows are Tamra Amick, Ken Azebu, Shyamoli Banerjee, Tina Bean, Curtis Cage, Winston Chen, Becky Cox, Christine Douglas, John Keller, Susan Mandell, Linda Sabeh, Archana Sathaye, Irene Silvestri and David Takamoto. Additional Fellows will be added this year and will be appointed for a three-year term.
Harker has long recognized individuals who are supporters of Harker and who provide the community with invaluable advice and resources. According to Zecher, the role of a Fellow is to promote the Harker mission with the knowledge that the provision of an outstanding education for today’s youth will guarantee the success of our community tomorrow.
“We are exceedingly fortunate to have such a diverse group of Fellows, each of whom brings to the Board a particular talent and know-how. Our Board of Fellows is here to help ensure that vital strategic initiatives are accomplished. I am particularly thrilled to be a part of this team,” he said.
During the Board of Fellows meeting at the Keller home, time was spent reviewing Harker’s student involvements and achievements over the summer. Fellows were also updated on the school’s strategic priorities as recommended by a recent accreditation process.
Built in 1920, the Kellers’ Tudor revival is listed on the Saratoga Heritage Resources Inventory and was designed by renowned architect Julia Morgan. In fact, it was the second largest private home she designed after Hearst Castle. One of the home’s original owners, Henrietta Goodrich, was a poet. As a token of their appreciation for the gracious hosting of the event, the Board of Fellows presented the Kellers with a framed photo of Goodrich’s poem “Homecoming.”
This story recently appeared in the winter 2012 edition of Harker Quarterly.
The “Claws Vegas” auction room, as it has been in past years, was one of the biggest attractions for this year’s picnickers. Teacher packages remained popular this year, as families bid for the opportunity to experience various fun-filled outings with Harker faculty.
Lower school social studies teacher Tobias Wade’s Paintball Challenge package took a group of students and faculty to Santa Clara Paintball over Thanksgiving weekend to play a variety of games, such as “Protect the President” and “Zombie War.”
“Teams are mixed up all the time,” Wade said, “but the students really like the kids against the teachers.” He enjoys seeing the students have a good time outside the classroom. “In paintball they are free to run around and jump around and act as crazy as they want,” he said. “It is fun to see them in a different light and element.”
This story recently appeared in the winter 2012 edition of Harker Quarterly.
Attendees at the 62nd Harker Family & Alumni Picnic on Oct. 14 gloried in the timelessness of the picnic: new things each year – especially the faces of students growing up – and some of the classics, like the never-get-tired-of-it dunk tank. The whole event, one of the big opening events of the school year, was attended by flocks of picnickers and again fulfilled its promise in providing fun and entertainment to the entire Harker community on a warm fall day.
Families were greeted by Harker faculty and staff as they reached the entrance to the middle school campus, where the day’s festivities took place. This year’s theme, “Jaws, Paws and Claws,” celebrated all manner of wildlife, and patrons were treated to animal shows at the Blackford amphitheater throughout the day.
The crowd was also entertained by an energetic show by a wide selection of groups from Harker’s performing arts department, including Dance Fusion, the grade 4-6 boys and girls dance group; Downbeat, the upper school show choir; and Dynamics, the grade 6 choir.
Picnickers, particularly the younger ones, especially enjoyed being able to see and pet the pigs, goats, rabbits and other animals on display at the petting area. Talented and well-trained dogs performed tricks and ran through an obstacle course to the delight of audiences, and even a python several feet in length was available for visitors to view and briefly wear on their shoulders.
The always-popular game booths were among the main attractions throughout the day. Volunteers spun wheels of fortune, players tossed golf balls, shot hoops and more to win a myriad of prizes, including stuffed animals, toys and bottles of wine. One of the most popular carnival games, the dunk tank, continued to be a hit with picnic-goers. “The dunk tank was a little cold today. If you noticed, the weather was a little overcast,” said upper school chemistry teacher Andrew Irvine, who had an early shift. He was one of a number of faculty members who had the honor of sitting in the dunk tank this year, and one of the most enthusiastic: “I kind of like the anticipation,” Irvine said.
Kaela Bien, grade 5, who liked “watching the teachers get dunked,” also enjoyed the canine feats on display at the dog show. “It’s fun, and they’re sort of mischievous, too,” she said.
Generous student and parent volunteers helped sell tickets to the booths helped sell tickets to the booths that kept visitors entertained and fed all day. Food booths, run by parents, faculty and staff, served delicious refreshments, snacks and hot meals from a variety of vendors. Returning were the food trucks, which proved a hit during the 2011 picnic and received a similar response this year, serving Asian fusion and other types of cuisine.
At the “Claws Vegas” silent auction area, attendees bid on all sorts of prizes, ranging from trips to New York City and Las Vegas to sleepovers and animal-shaped topiaries. Parent alumna Tiffany Nishimura ’86 (Alexis, grade 2), said the silent auction was her favorite part of the picnic for the wide variety of prizes available and the various opportunities for “supporting the school.”
Harker alumni had a big presence at this year’s picnic, with more than 130 alumni and their families joining in on the fun. A special lunch area was set aside so that alumni could meet and reminisce, while alumni children enjoyed a craft activity. MaryEllis Deacon, alumni director, reflected on the picnic, saying, “It is a time to come back, reconnect and visit with those teachers who helped you as a child become who you are today. It also allows you to remember the fun things, the games, the food and the spirit of Harker.”
Parent Vincy Chan (Gemma, K; Gianna, grade 3) said she enjoyed seeing the community’s hard work come to fruition: “It’s like a family, so I just love helping out, and then … seeing all our hard work.”
“When you see everybody come together, and see all the people in their civilian clothing, it shows the magic that makes the Harker community Harker,” Irvine said.
Following the picnic, Chris Nikoloff, head of school, gave well-deserved credit to all responsible for the event’s success. “Special thanks to the talented and creative flock of volunteers who comprise the picnic committee and the Harker faculty and staff who were as busy as beavers helping to make the picnic a great success,” Nikoloff said, making special mention of picnic co-chairs Lynette Stapleton, Kelly Espinosa and Tiffany Hurst, “whose vision made it possible for all our little eagles and their families to soar to new heights today!”
This story recently appeared in the winter 2012 edition of Harker Quarterly.
Author and neighborhood organizer Mike Lanza spoke at the first Harker Speaker Series event of the year on Sept. 14 to share his insights into how neighborhoods can be great places for children to grow up and lead fun, fulfilling lives.Lanza made the point that many kids spend too much time in front of screens, be they television sets, laptops or tablets. On average, he noted, kids spend about eight hours each day consuming visual media. Their lives are also highly scheduled, with sporting events, lessons and other activities. “They have no time on their own in the world to do things,” Lanza said.Lack of unstructured play time leads to several problems, he said, among them obesity, depression and lack of creativity. He added, however, that taking away screen time and sending kids off into their neighborhoods won’t work on its own, because many neighborhoods are “boring.”
To remedy this problem in his Menlo Park neighborhood, Lanza made changes to his home to make it into a place where neighborhood children could play whenever they wanted, including a driveway that could be drawn on, a picnic table in the front yard, a whiteboard fixed to a fence and a playhouse where kids can write on the walls.
“We’re defacing everything we can,” Lanza said. “We want this place to look like kids live here. We want them to feel like they own this place.”
As a result, neighborhood children regularly engage with one another in outdoor activities, and families have come to know one another much better.
This story recently appeared in the winter 2012 edition of Harker Quarterly.
John Hunter, named one of Time magazine’s top 12 education activists, and voted “most influential” TED speaker, appeared at Harker in early October as part of the Common Ground Speaker Series.
Hunter, an award-winning teacher, discussed his invention of the “World Peace games,” a “geopolitical simulation” that is played mostly by students in grade 4 but is suitable for all ages. The game focuses on building real-world problem-solving skills. Students play various roles in the game, such as world leaders, cabinet members and even arms dealers. Some students are even given roles of great power, such as the ability to control the weather or determine if a business venture will succeed. Aside from facilitating, Hunter never directly intervenes.
Students must use the power they have been given in each role to solve the problems presented to them. Every country in the game must also have its asset value raised by the time it ends. “In other words, everybody has to win for the game to be won,” Hunter said. In addition, he makes Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” required reading for all students participating in the game.
The event included a viewing of a documentary film from 2006 that showed Hunter’s students working together to finish the game successfully. In the 34 years that he has been running the game for his students, Hunter said, “They have never failed to save the world. They do it in different ways every time.”
This story recently appeared in the winter 2012 edition of Harker Quarterly.
Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan-born best-selling author of “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” was the honored guest of the Harker Speaker Series on Nov. 30, speaking about the writing process, his experiences in Afghanistan and his humanitarian efforts with The Khaled Hosseini Foundation.Hosseini also attended a pre-event reception for attendees who purchased special tickets to meet the author and receive a personalized copy of one of his novels. Warm and charming, Hosseini chatted with ABC-7 anchor Cheryl Jennings on a range of topics. Jennings also participates in Afghani relief efforts and was a natural choice for this informal, interview-style conversation. Before his appearance, a video of an ABC-7 report by Jennings was shown, briefing the audience of about 400 on The Khaled Hosseini Foundation and briefly mentioning Harker’s involvement. Founded in 2007, the organization raises money to build shelters and provide education, food and healthcare to women and children in Afghanistan, which is experiencing many humanitarian crises after experiencing decades of war. Hosseini’s wife, Roya, is also deeply involved, helping with a program that enables Afghan women to sell crafts to raise money for humanitarian aid. These goods were being sold at a table in the gym the night of Hosseini’s visit. Jennings asked Hosseini about his 2003 and 2007 visits to Afghanistan, during which he saw “a ton of people who had come back to Afghanistan from either Pakistan or Iran trying to resettle, restart their lives in their country and were really having a very, very hard time,” he said. “It shattered me.” Although he watched much of the crises in Afghanistan unfold from outside the country, he nevertheless found that his memories of his childhood in the country were helpful in writing “The Kite Runner.” “It took me by surprise how vivid my memories were,” he said, recalling his time growing up with educated parents and living a somewhat “westernized” lifestyle. He was also surprised by how much the events he had written in the book came to life during his visit. “I started having experiences that I had just imagined this character would have, and I had even written a book about it,” he said. While working on “Splendid Suns,” he took on the challenge of writing from a woman’s perspective, something he at first approached with some overconfidence, despite warnings from his literary agent at the time, the late Elaine Koster. “I have to admit I was a little smug about it,” he recalled. “And then, about three, four months later, I began to see what she meant.” He overcame the difficulty by rendering women in a more universal sense. “I’m just going to concentrate on what motivates them; what do they want from life, what are they afraid of, what are their hopes, and so on,” he said. “It seems trite and simple enough, but all of the solutions in my writing life have always been simple – it’s just very hard to get to them.” Hosseini said he was proud to have changed the perceptions people have of the Afghan people through his writing. “I’ve had letters from people who were really kind of toxic haters of people from that region. And yet, they read the book and they saw something of themselves in the experiences of these characters,” he said. “And they slowly changed. That to me is a tremendous gift as a writer. That’s going to outlive anything that I’ve ever done.” Following his talk with Jennings, Hosseini stayed to take questions from the audience and sign books.
This story recently appeared in the winter 2012 edition of Harker Quarterly.
Students Clean Up the Coast
Almost 50 community members stepped up in September for the 26th annual California Coastal Cleanup Day. Inspired by this year’s lower school theme of compassion, parent volunteer Kelly Lewis Brezoczky (Katherine, grade 3; Charlotte, grade 5; Emma, grade 7) coordinated Harker’s participation, and service and spirit club advisor Katie Molin invited grade 4 and 5 families to help pick up debris littered across Pillar Point and Pilarcitos Creek in Half Moon Bay.
Youth Citizen of the Year
Tara Rezvani, grade 12, was recognized at Los Gatos’ Youth Park Citizen Day on Sept. 29 as one of Los Gatos’ Youth Citizens of the Year. Among Rezvani’s many accomplishments are organizing a health camp for children, volunteer work at El Camino Hospital and induction to the National French Honor Society.
Collecting Food for the Needy
The Service Club at the middle school ran a canned food drive and, for each item, students were given a strip of construction paper to hang in the windows of Activity Avenue to create a colorful, proud display of Harker’s giving spirit. The lower school also ran their annual food drive, organized for more than 20 years as the grade 5 service project by teacher Pat Walsh. Donations all went to St. Justin’s Church in Santa Clara. Walsh noted St. Justin’s provides groceries and hot meals all year long.
Advisories Help Prep Toiletries for Donation
Pat White, middle school history teacher, ran a toiletry drive again this year for the gloria Travis Center for Homeless Women and Children. White’s advisory sorts and bags donated items for delivery. White hopes to deliver about 500 sandwich bags of toiletries.
Holiday Gift Giving in Full Swing
Three different programs collected gifts for those in need. Family Supportive Housing, which runs the Adopt-a-Family program, collects holiday wish lists from families in need which are distributed to those who want to help out during the holiday season.
The Family Giving Tree matches givers up to individuals rather than families. This is Harker’s third year participating. Patricia Lai Burrows, an English teacher at the middle school, said, “Last year, we successfully fulfilled 200 wishes, and this year, I signed up to fulfill 350 wishes.” Currently, Harker is on track to fulfill 400.
Sunday Friends, a nonprofit that helps families in need, put together a list of holiday gift items their families would enjoy. The sophomore class used this year’s homecoming theme of Disney movies for inspiration and selected “Toy Story.” They made a giant toy box featuring characters from the movie, and each of the 185 members of the sophomore class donated a toy for Sunday Friends.
Giving to Our Furry Friends
Andrea Milius and Mark Gelineau, middle school teachers, wanted to do something special for this year’s family picnic theme of “Paws, Jaws and Claws” (click here for the picnic wrapup). They encouraged their advisories to do chores at home to earn money and then split the $230 in earnings between National Geographic’s campaign, “Create an Uproar” to save big cats, and a wolf pack at a sanctuary in Mississippi.
Hurricane Sandy Relief
The lower school took initiative in the wake of Hurricane Sandy and connected with Coney Island Preparatory School in New York, where 30 students lost their homes and 30 more families lost their cars. The administration at Coney Island Preparatory is offering storm victims modest grants. To help them achieve this goal, the student council at the lower school sold cups of hot chocolate on the playground over the course of several days and took donations. Business was brisk, and the entire amount was donated directly to the Coney Island Preparatory families.
Several Harker students successfully auditioned for roles in an upcoming independent film being produced by the Bay Area-based Silk Road Films. Auditions for the movie, to be titled “Family Party,” were held Dec. 4-5 at the upper school campus. With filming scheduled for April, during Harker’s spring break, the film will feature students Vishal Vaidya, grade 10, as Nick; Apurva Tandon, grade 12, as Arti; Jai Ahuja, grade 10, in the role of Sahil; Rahul Nalamasu, grade 12, playing Sanjay; Cecilia Lang-Ree, grade 12, as Tanya; and Alice Tsui, grade 12, as Amanda.
This article originally appeared in the winter 2012 Harker Quarterly.
After finishing the Radiator Springs Racers ride at Disneyland’s Cars Land (a fabulous attraction, by the way, and a great movie, too), my family and I stopped to glance at the obligatory snapshot of our astonished faces taken while on the ride. I noticed that instead of buying the photo many patrons just snapped a picture of the picture with their camera phones. I questioned why anyone would buy the actual picture when they can “take” the picture in this fashion.
Then I noticed that indeed patrons were lining up to buy the actual photo. Why? Because it is a great souvenir from Cars Land. It comes with the frame and official logo. It is bigger. And it is something you can touch, drop on your toes, hang on your children’s bedroom walls, or look at without turning on a power button. Atoms still matter.
I was recently talking with a parent who creates a photo book on her children’s birthdays, a real one you can leaf through, of their previous year. She said that if she didn’t do this, the hundreds of photos she had taken over the previous year would remain in digital form, a collection of ones and zeros in some cloud, never to be seen. Atoms still matter.
While a senior was interviewing me for the student newspaper I asked her how she and her friends read. She said that she and most of her friends still prefer to study with books made from wood pulp. “ Why,” I asked? “I don’t know,” she said. “We just do. We can take notes more easily.” I was stunned. Atoms still matter.
Why do music lovers still collect vinyl? Why do shoppers check out an item in a store before buying it online? Why does The Economist, in its October 2012 special report on the relationship between geography and technology, argue that location, real dirt that you can stomp on, plays a huge role in the proliferation of technology? Because atoms still matter.
Readers who have endured the essay this far may have noticed a pun. Atoms are matter. And as philosopher Alan Watts points out, matter is derived from the same root as the word mother. It also relates to measure and maya, which means illusion. The universe is mother to all things. Measuring those things, however useful, is illusory. You cannot touch the equator. It is not made of atoms.
How does this matter to education? Two ways. One, education is largely learning about a vast set of abstractions. (Let’s not forget that the alphabet is a form of digital technology.) And two, the digital transmission of those abstractions for almost no cost is disrupting traditional schooling.
Those abstractions we learn in school relate to the real world. We learn about a real person who died in the early 19th century named Napoleon and we learn how to construct real bridges, for example. But we can forget that the world of abstractions that we study in school – by definition – is not synonymous with the world of atoms. As is commonly said, we mistake the menu for the dinner.
We can forget how powerful abstractions are. For instance, the world has enough wealth for everyone. But when the abstractions we have created that stand for wealth, what Niall Ferguson calls “Planet Finance,” collapse, the real world of atoms is sent into a tailspin of panic and destruction. Real education, so long as it claims to educate the leaders of tomorrow, has to be grounded in the real world. Atoms still matter.
The digital transmission of the abstractions we call education will tear through traditional education like iTunes did the record industry. But live interaction with a caring teacher will always be optimal. Why? Because we are human, at least for now. Ray Kurzweil talks about the coming marriage of technology and biology in “The Singularity is Near,” but for now, our 5- and 13- and 17-year-olds are fully human and it takes a village to raise them.
In fact, the first point is dependent upon the second. How can children remain grounded in the world of atoms if they aren’t taught about the world surrounded by it? How can they learn to care about humans if they aren’t taught by and around them? Atoms still matter.
In closing, we cannot escape the world of atoms, even if we try. In fact, the digital world is based on a system of ones and zeros – on and off – that is the very fabric of our nervous system and embedded in the rhythms of nature. Leibniz based his discovery of binary math on the Yin and Yang principles he discovered in “The Book of Changes.”
So when we whirl around the world digitally we are extending our nervous system across vast distances. Or when we ride an attraction like Radiator Springs Racers we trust that the engineers, with their abstract systems of ones and zeros, held the proper respect for atoms in their minds while building the thrills of tomorrow.
In early November, this year’s Siemens Competition regional finalists gave presentations of their research to Harker students and faculty in the Nichols Hall auditorium. Ashvin Swaminathan, Paulomi Bhattacharya and Rohan Chandra, all grade 12, and Zareen Choudhury, grade 11, each gave presentations on the projects that they would be presenting at the regional finals later in the month.
After the presentations concluded, each student took questions from the audience concerning the findings shared in the presentations and the methodology used to reach their conclusions.