Taylor Eigsti returned to a sold-out Nichols Hall auditorium on Sept. 28 to kick off the third season of the Harker Concert Series. Performing to a very enthusiastic crowd, the 27-year-old jazz piano phenom again dazzled an audience made up of everyone from budding jazz fans to longtime aficionados.
The slow, lilting chords of Eigsti’s version of the jazz standard “Cheryl” coursed through the auditorium as the show began, expertly punctuated by veteran drummer Jason Lewis’ light cymbal hits. The trio soon brought up the volume, with Eigsti bassist John Shifflett playing in fast, tight harmony. Never one to chew up scenery, Eigsti gave Shifflett and Lewis ample room to display their knack for tasteful soloing, in addition to showcasing his own immense chops.
“Speaking Song,” one of Eigsti’s own compositions, started with a fast, tricky solo filled with arpeggios and wide intervals, flowing into a strident and confident melody. Following Shifflett’s melodious bass solo, the band shifted into a gallop during Eigsti’s solo, culminating in a raucous middle section before mellowing for the ending.
For the last song of the first set, a rendition of Kenny Dorham’s “Lotus Blossom,” the trio was joined by Eigsti’s longtime friend and Harker middle school music teacher Dave Hart on trumpet. Hart navigated the songs shifting times and rhythms in seemingly effortless fashion, and also showcased his formidable improvisational skills.
During the intermission, several guests at the show remarked about the quality of the venue and reception.
“It’s wonderful,” said Vickie Grove of Portola Valley, a longtime Taylor Eigsti fan who attended last year’s concert. “I love the venue. It’s small. The food is excellent. It’s really fun.”
Kim Huynh, who lives in San Jose, decided to attend after being impressed with her experience seeing pianist Adam Golka last season, saying she enjoyed the “very nice reception. It was exceptional. It was great.”
The second set had some more surprises, including another guest turn by Dave Hart on “Declan,” written by Lewis and named after his son, and a powerful performance on vocals by the young and talented Laila Smith on “Midnight After Noon,” written by Eigsti with Becca Stevens.
Among the more emotionally charged pieces performed was “Distressed,” which Eigsti composed for the 2011 film “Detachment,” starring Adrien Brody. Fittingly, Eigsti performed with no accompaniment for this brooding piece, which was at times also dissonant, plodding and atmospheric.
Eigsti finished the show with the uplifting, groove-driven “Magnolia,” whose rousing mid-section and calming final moments drew a well-deserved extended ovation.
This article was originally published in the fall 2012 Harker Quarterly.
Harker’s campuses were a hubbub of summertime activity as the school opened its doors to the public, extending its huge variety of programs to local students, both Harker and non-Harker, and to students from around the globe.
This year saw a potpourri of summer programming options: from Camp+ for younger children, to the Summer Institute for middle and high school students, to a bevy of sports offerings, and the world renowned English Language Institute program.
In fact, for the last 50 years Harker has served as a recognized resource for a wide breadth of summer happenings. New this season was expanded programming for the sports camps. According to Kelly Espinosa, director of summer programs, Harker has always had tennis, soccer, swimming, and sports performance camps. But added this year were football, basketball, volleyball, and water polo camps.
Much thought went into the new sports camps, which integrated lower school and middle school athletics with upper school instructors to create a seamless path for athletes within their chosen sports. Moreover, sports camp participants taking a morning sports program had the option to enroll separately in another camp’s afternoon activity as well.
At Harker, known for its academic excellence, athletic camps were just one of the summer options. For K-6 students, Camp+ offered a full day of morning academics and afternoon activities. Located on Harker’s lower school campus, parents chose sessions by their preferred format, with full-day, partial-day and morning-only options. Students had the choice of enrolling in either Core Focus or LoL (Learning opportunities in Literature). Both programs concluded at 11:30 a.m. to make room for the afternoon activity program, which lasted until 3:30. Core Focus is a three- or four-week math and language arts-focused program. LoL is a two-week integrated curriculum centered on a literary theme. After-care was provided until 5:30, which included pool time, archery and a climbing wall, among other activities.
Meanwhile, The Harker School’s Summer Institute (SI) gave students from grades 6-12 the chance to earn credits, learn new skills and follow their passions. This year’s institute attracted 722 students, with many taking multiple courses. New offerings were art classes, including portfolio preparation in 2-D and 3-D drawing. The for-credit courses included a variety of classes in math, history and technology. Upper school enrichment courses spanned math, writing, art, history and driver’s education. Middle school enrichment was also offered, and included several core subjects as well as classes such as So You Think You Can Cook? and Champion Chess. All SI participants had access to the libraries, pools and a prepared lunch. In addition to sports offerings, Camp+ and SI, each year more than 100 international students – from elementary through high school – participate in Harker’s renowned english Language Institute (eLI) program. They come with the goal of improving their English speaking and writing skills but leave with a breathtaking exposure to cultural adventures as well.
It may be an old cliché, but when it comes to educating these foreign students, the world really is their classroom. Weekly field trips provide international students exposure to local points of interest such as the Golden Gate Bridge, beautiful California beaches, Northern California redwood forest and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The trips are incorporated into the curriculum and students use their travel experiences to create written and oral projects for presentation.
“Harker has been offering outstanding summer programs, held on the school’s safe, secure and centrally-located campuses, for more than 50 years. We have everything a camp consumer could want,” said Espinosa, noting that whether just out of preschool or about to enter their last year of high school, students of all ages and backgrounds can find their perfect summer program at Harker.
For more information on Harker’s summer offerings visit www.summer.harker.org.
Gillian Wallin, grade 10, performed with her band, AUX Input, at the Celebrate Saratoga street festival on Sept. 16. Wallin, who also plays in the upper school jazz band, plays drums in the band, which performed for the thousands of patrons who attend the festival each year.
Grade 5 and grade 12 students hit the turf at Davis Field on Sept. 20 for the first Eagle Buddies event of the year. After pairing up, the students separated into three groups, each taking part in one of three fun activities set up for the day.
One group of buddies had a blast playing a game in which they had to keep several balloons in the air. Each balloon had a topic written on it, such as role model, favorite animal or favorite superhero. At the end of the game, each pair of buddies caught one of the balloons and sat down to discuss what was written on the balloon. Over at the bleachers, buddies put their heads together to create stylish and intricate logos on their name tags. At another spot, buddies ran up and down the field in a classic three-legged race. Groups were rotated through the three areas to make sure every student had the chance to have fun with all the activities.
After the students had spent time at each activity, they all enjoyed conversation over a hamburger lunch on Davis Field.
Cole Smitherman, grade 5, and his buddy, Pranav Sharma, grade 12, had just met the day of the event but had corresponded by mail beforehand. They learned about each others’ favorite books during the balloon activity (Smitherman’s is “Harry Potter,” while Sharma’s is Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”). “It’s really cool just to be able to connect with someone who’s much younger than we are, and how we were once,” Sharma said.
Grace Hajjar, grade 5, has known her buddy, senior Amy Gendotti, since the Eagle Buddies program started in 2010. “When we first met, we were sort of shy and all, because we didn’t know what we liked,” Hajjar said. “So we got to know each other, and it’s been good.”
Gendotti said the program has been beneficial to her because, “I got to go to a lot of events I normally wouldn’t because I don’t have any younger siblings or anything.”
In August, Stephanie Chen, grade 11, received word that she had earned a second place award in the Ayn Rand Institute’s “Anthem” Essay Contest, in which high school students submit analytical essays on Rand’s influential novella. For her effort, Chen won a $500 prize.
Chen, who entered the most recent contest during her grade 10 year, first entered the contest while in grade 9 and was named a semifinalist. She attributed much of her success in her second attempt to her grade 10 English class with teacher Jennifer Siraganian.
Middle School Softball
The team is off to a 3-1 start putting them in first place in league with 3-0 record. The team is led by the strong pitching of Meghan Robertson, grade 6, and timely hitting from Kristin LeBlanc, grade 7 and Marti Sutton, grade 8. Strong contributions have come from Lavinia Ding and Grace Park, both grade 8, and Tiffany Shou, grade 7. The team has received strong catching support from Anika Rajamani, grade 6, and some clutch play from Taylor Lam, also grade 6.
Girls Tennis
Girls tennis went 3-0 this week against CCS-quality opponents, wrapping up their strong showing with a dominant 7-0 victory on the road against archrival Sacred Heart Prep. Co-captain Jenny Chen, grade 12, faced off against Sacred Heart’s number one and walked away with the win in two sets 6-2, 6-2. Dora Tzeng, grade 11, extended her streak of outstanding play by blanking her opponent (6-0, 6-0) despite a lingering shoulder injury which forced her to serve underhand for the match. Daria Karakoulka, grade 12, won in straight sets, giving her an undefeated 8-0 record in September. On her way to a perfect month, Karakoulka lost nary a set.
In doubles matches, each of Harker’s teams captured victories as well – a meaningful rout against a foe in Sacred Heart whose doubles lineups had emerged as some of Harker’s strongest competition. Number one team Sat Prakash, grade 11, and Arden Hu, grade 10, won 6-4, 6-3. Number two team Izzy Gross, grade 9, and Sylvie Dobrota, grade 12, won 4-6, 6-1 (10-8). Finally, number three team Indica Sur, grade 12, and Ariana Shulman, grade 11, won 6-4, 6-4.
The team now stands at 5-0 and is 2-0 in the WBAL. Harker plays Notre Dame next Wednesday and then, on Thursday, has an important showdown with league co-leader Menlo at Blackford.
Girls Water Polo
Girls water polo pulled off a great win a couple of weeks ago against Santa Clara High School; check out the writeup in the Santa Clara Weekly.
This article was originally published in the fall 2012 Harker Quarterly.
This year, Harker faculty once again took advantage of Harker’s summer technology grant program to improve their classroom teaching methods. Since the program’s inception more than 10 years ago, dozens of faculty members have used tech grants to formulate new ways to teach, create and track assignments, devise engaging lessons and more.
Upper school librarian Meredith Cranston and history teacher Julie Wheeler collaborated on a project to help students better assess political issues. “Our tech grant goal was to identify the best platform to allow students to explore the broad range of political discourse, respond to these media forms, assessing credibility, accuracy and perspective and practice creating their own forms of political media in conversation with classmates and instructors,” Cranston said.
Cranston and Wheeler created a class blog for analyzing political issues, “a space where course content, current events and student interests will drive a lively and ongoing inquiry into democracy,” Cranston said.
Finally, they set up a site on Libguides.com that aggregates news and media on political issues, so students can create news feeds. “Together, we built a project that I know none of us could have come up with on our own,” Cranston said. “It was a very rewarding experience, and I feel very lucky to have had it!”
To help give her students greater access to geometry resources, middle school math teacher Vandana Kadam used Athena, Harker’s repository for online learning resources, to host “multiple resources for students for practice; I also posted all the homework answers so students can access this information any time,” she said. Kadam decided on this project after finding success in using Athena for a similar purpose with her Algebra II and Trigonometry classes.
“Students in the geometry classes will be able to use the practice material to get ready for tests, work on the activities for better understanding of the topics and also be able to check their homework at their own pace and come to class ready to ask questions,” she said. “This will be a huge time-saver.”
While working on the project, Kadam discovered more possibilities than she had originally imagined. “An idea that came up during the project is to put up some student work on the Athena page for other students to see,” she said. “I feel that the Athena page is now well-organized and students will be able to make full use of the resources.”
At the tech grant show-and-tell on Aug. 21, upper school biology teacher Jeff Sutton demonstrated an iPad application called Doceri, which allowed him to display an activity from his iPad on a laptop, which could in turn be hooked up to a projector. This granted him the ability to move freely about the classroom while making presentations and marking on the virtual whiteboard that faced the students. He plans to use the applications to display PowerPoint slides and make notes on them at the back of the classroom, so that the students can focus on the lessons being taught.
Another application he found, called Assist, analyzes photos of multiple-choice answer keys and saves them as files that can be compared with photos of student quizzes. The application then assigns grades to the student quizzes based on how well they match the answer keys. Sutton said students might be able to grade their own quizzes with the application by using a mounted iPad to take photos of their quiz sheets, which would then be graded automatically.
This article was originally published in the fall 2012 Harker Quarterly.
Summer at Harker got off to a great start as, in early June, a record-breaking number of educators from around the Bay Area attended the eighth annual Harker Teacher Institute.
More than 175 participants came out for the event held on the upper school campus to learn about technology and different methods to improve classroom curricula. Hosted by Harker’s instructional technology department and sponsored by the Silicon Valley Computer Using Educators (SVCUE),the annual institute has become increasingly popular.
Harker has long held ties with SVCUE, the local affiliate for San Mateo and Santa Clara counties of Computer-Using Educators, Inc. of California (CUE). CUE and SVCUE are committed to networking, resources and the integration of all forms of technology throughout the curriculum.
This year’s event focused on free or inexpensive classroom technology tools and kicked off with a welcome address from Dan Hudkins, Harker’s K-12 director of instructional technology. The half-day institute included a continental breakfast, afternoon lunch and three breakout sessions with a number of workshops to choose from. Presenters were primarily Harker teachers from K-12, with one presenter from the local community.
Workshop titles included “NoodleTools: Tools for Student Research,” presented by Kathy Clark, Harker’s lower school librarian, who has used NoodleTools with students in grades 4-5 for the past six years. Clark led a discussion of NoodleBib, which assists students in creating properly cited bibliographies.
Another popular workshop was Renee Ramig’s “iPads in Middle School Classrooms.” Session leader Ramig, director of technology at The Seven Hills School in Walnut Creek, has been working in educational technology for the past 26 years at a variety of Catholic, public and independent schools. She shared some apps that middle school teachers have successfully used in their classrooms.
Extremely relevant in today’s quickly evolving world of publishing was Hudkins’ afternoon session, “Where are We Going with eText?” With so many variations of readers and texts from Kindle to Nook to iPad, it can be confusing to navigate as the textbook world begins to move from paper to digital format. Hudkins presented informative background on current pitfalls, options and opportunities.
The workshops taught by Clark, Ramig and Hudkins were just a few of many useful options to choose from.
The institute started as a summer session that trained Harker staff to use mathematics software and develop a project-oriented curriculum. In 2008, however, Fred Triefenbach, then assistant director of instructional technology and a computer science teacher at the upper school, had the idea that Harker should share this knowledge with the community at large, which led to the creation of the Harker Teacher Institute.
This year’s event was bittersweet for Triefenbach, who was preparing to retire after 12 years of working at Harker. “Over the years, the event has really evolved into a huge success,” he said proudly, adding how gratifying it has been to share his knowledge about technology in education with the wider educational community.
This article was originally published in the fall 2012 Harker Quarterly.
Craig Pasqua, the tennis director at the upper school campus, took his tennis skills off campus this summer – all the way to Oklahoma City, Okla., to compete in the inaugural Jim Thorpe Games. The games benefit the Jim Thorpe Association, which encourages and celebrates excellence in athletes representing Indian nations. “My regular partner, John Blackhawk, who is the CEO of the Winnebago Nation in Nebraska, couldn’t make it so I teamed up with another partner,” Pasqua said. The last-minute change didn’t rattle him. In fact, the duo proved to have a winning chemistry, and they took home a bronze medal in doubles. Pasqua said he had also planned on entering the men’s 35 singles, but the category, it turned out, wasn’t being offered. He instead entered men’s singles, where he was consolation champion.
The games are named after legendary athlete Jim Thorpe, a Native American who competed in college football, professional football, Major League Baseball and the Olympics. All proceeds from the games go to benefit the Jim Thorpe Bright Path Youth programs and Native American diabetes research.
Victor Adler, a mathematics teacher at the upper school, also found an exciting outlet for his talents and experiences this summer. While teaching a pre-calculus summer class, he was offered a diagnostic test to give his students that would help show where each student stood in math placement. Coincidentally, a friend of his who teaches at the University of California, San Diego, called and said he was working on an interesting project – the same diagnostic test Adler had been offered. There was an opening on the test development team, and Adler was happy to join in.
“The cool thing is that these guys have collected a lot of data,” Adler said. “There’s a very methodical, rigorous method to producing questions on this test that allows you to collect good data. You can take the test online and get the data back nearly instantly.” The test helps teachers analyze where students are weak and at what stages. “I have a feeling the test will be a bit too easy for Harker students,” he said. “It’s aimed more at the general public.”
In addition to being part of great data collection and test development, Adler was also able to work with teachers from around the state, including University of California and California State University professors. “It gives me a greater connection to what is being taught at a large swath of educational institutions,” Adler said.
Chrissy Chang, K-8 P.E. department chair, was invited by the San Jose State University department of kinesiology to speak at the department dinner for the university’s 150th graduation in late May. Chang is a 1996 graduate of the department and a former student-athlete on the women’s basketball team. She currently serves on the board of directors for the SJSU Alumni Association and Order of Sparta.
Chang said as a proud alumna, it was an honor to be chosen as the speaker for this event and added that the university has helped shaped her into the person that she is today.
“The celebratory evening was great,” said Chang. “To be in the presence of faculty and staff who prepared me as well as the graduates to be leaders, difference-makers and problem- solvers within the kinesiology field was awesome. It was an opportunity to thank those who gave me the tools and foundation to be successful in my career and share my personal story with the graduates. Be a proud Spartan! Go Spartans! Hail Spartans!”
Chang teaches grade 8 P.E. and middle school health, is a member of the coaching staff and has worked in the past as a director of the summer program.
This article was originally published in the fall 2012 Harker Quarterly.
Many of Harker’s performing arts faculty enhanced their professional resumes this summer, returning to Harker with new stories and new skills.
Jenny Sandusky, who leads lower and upper school vocal ensembles, went on tour to Los Angeles with Ragazzi, a Grammy award-winning boys chorus based on the peninsula. Sandusky is the group’s associate artistic director.
Karl Kuehn, upper school dance teacher, also connected with Ragazzi. “I worked [with them] on choreography for their upcoming season,” he notes. Kuehn also taught a summer dance intensive at Atlas School of Dance in San Jose and attended the Dance Teacher’s Summit in New York City, where participants took part in movement sessions, seminars and workshops led by expert teachers.
Monica Colletti, middle school performing arts teacher, visited the famed Second City organization in Chicago. “I worked on my improvisation skills in a week-long intensive course in improv and sketch writing,” she said. Second City is a top-notch theater and improvisation group that has produced countless Saturday Night Live alumni.
Danny Dunn, lower school technical director, wrote and directed two circus shows in the month of July and found outlets for a wide variety of skills across various media including finishing another children’s book.
Every summer, Jeff Draper, upper school performing arts teacher and dean of the class of 2013, is the education director at Young Rep, a theater workshop in Walnut Creek now in its 39th year. He directed and taught classes as varied as British scene study performance, Shakespeare in performance, a make-up master class and an advanced voice and speech class. He also taught film acting: “A lot of film equipment that I learned how to use and edit with, I will be using at Harker this fall.”
Upper school music teacher Susan Nace participated in Harker’s Tamagawa teacher exchange program. Read the full story here.
Finally, Laura Lang-Ree, K-12 performing arts department chair, worked on both her directing skills and her theater skills at the Broadway Teachers Workshop in New York City, a course that brings in current Broadway professionals to work with participants. She took courses on script analysis, vocal interpretation and dance. Lang-Ree is also the vocalist for the Los Gatos/Saratoga Big Band, and performed with them at Santana Row and the San Jose Jazz Festival.