This year’s annual Harker Cancer Walk was a huge success, bringing in $7,700 in one day alone, with donations still being received at Harker News Online press time. Middle school students, faculty and Harker family members went the extra mile – both literally and figuratively – in an effort to raise money for Camp Okizu.
The camp provides fun activities and quality care for young cancer patients, enabling them to enjoy such outdoor childhood pastimes as swimming, boating, archery and a ropes course, in addition to social events.
“Even Mother Nature got with the program!” said Cindy Ellis, middle school head, who organized the event with middle school computer science teacher Michael Schmidt. Schmidt began organizing the Cancer Walk in 2007 following the passing of his mother due to cancer in 2006.
Along with the welcome warm weather, Ellis was pleased with the large amount of T-shirts, water bottles, Jamba Juice, baked goodies, temporary tattoos and wrist bands which were sold, supplementing the direct donations.
Thanking the Harker community for once again stepping up to the plate, Schmidt said, “It was a beautiful day filled with sunshine, giving and inspiration.”
“Michael deserves a special word of gratitude; he is the driving force behind this event. Fortunately, he has picked up some special helpers along the way. This walk signifies the wonderful heart and spirit of the entire community, including faculty, staff, parents and students,” said Ellis.
Donations are still being accepted at this time. Checks or cash can be brought to the Blackford campus front office. Checks can be made out to either Camp Okizu or Harker.
Raghav Sehtia, grade 12, has been honored with the prestigious Blue Diamond Award from the Second Harvest Food Bank. The award was handed to Sehtia from Kathy Jackson, CEO of Second Harvest, during the food bank’s recent 21st annual recognition event held at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts.
This award is the food bank’s highest level of award, and is normally given to corporations and organizations. Sehtia stood out as an exception in receiving this award as an individual. Previously, Sehtia was recognized for his efforts to fight hunger by being named a 2011 Stephen J. Brady STOP Hunger Regional Honoree. He also received the Platinum Award last spring from the Second Harvest Food Bank for his work in organizing food drives for the past four years.
“Using birthday money along with the proceeds of bake sales held during the school year and at assorted school breaks, Raghav raised nearly $3200 for Second Harvest Food Bank over the past year. I was delighted to present him with a Blue Diamond Award at our recent Freedom From Hunger awards. Raghav’s determination to support the hungry in our community is truly inspiring,” said Jackson.
“I want to convey my heartfelt thanks to the whole Harker community in motivating and inspiring Raghav in one way or the other,” said Arvind Sehtia, his father.
Sehtia has called volunteering a passion of his. To read more articles about his volunteer efforts with the Second Harvest Food Bank and other organizations, click on the links below:
Last month the lower, middle and upper school jazz bands united to present an Evening of Jazz. Held at the Blackford Theater, the event was led by Louis Hoffman, Dave Hart and Chris Florio, the directors of the jazz bands for each campus.
Kicking off the evening, The Harker School Jazz Band performed “Two Seconds to Midnight” by composer Alan Baylock and “Harker Swing” by David Len Allen, arranged by Harker music aide Paul Woodruff.
Those numbers were followed by the Lower School Jazz Ensemble’s rendition of John Coltrane’s “Equinox” and Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man.” Then, the Middle School Jazz Band performed the more traditional numbers “Motherless Child” and “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
Following a brief intermission and further performances by all three ensembles came the combined finale, “Work Song” by Nat Adderley. Running the gamut from rousing, upbeat swing numbers to slow, soulful ballads, Evening of Jazz showcased the breadth of Harker student talent and entertained and delighted its audience.
Staff for the show included Brian Larsen, production manager, and Paul Vallerga, technical director. The Harker performing arts department noted its gratitude to contributors to the school’s annual campaign, which helps make programs such as this possible.
The regional Science Bowl held at the NASA AMES Research Center in March was won by Harker’s team of Rishabh Chandra, Jonathan Ma and Michael Zhao, all grade 8, and Aneesh Samineni and David Zhu, both grade 7. This team will be headed to Washington, D.C., in late April to compete at the national competition. “The students have worked extremely hard to earn this title and deserve every bit of this success,” said Vandana Kadam, middle school mathematics department chair.
Upper school students Matthew Huang, grade 9, Stephanie Chen, grade 10 and Christopher Fu, also grade 10, coached the middle school students in preparation for the competition, visiting the middle school campus on Fridays after school. “They have put in an enormous amount of time, effort and energy into training the team and taking them to the top spot,” Kadam said. “They deserve the kudos along with the participants.”
Question: What award show features eye-catching, creatively designed outfits worn by beautiful people delivering riveting speeches? (Hint … it’s not the Academy Awards …)
The answer: Harker’s very own Ogre Awards!
Captivating its audience, and giving other awards shows a run for their money in cuteness factor alone, was the lower school’s 16th annual Ogre Awards. Written and directed by beloved librarian Enid Davis, the production, held last month, starred 88 grade 2 students and their teachers (otherwise known as the Ogre Academy).
Outside the day was dismal and gray, yet the atmosphere inside the Bucknall gym where the ceremony took place was light and cheery. Purple and fuchsia curtains flanked the stage, which was decorated with gold and white balloons. An eager anticipation filled the room as guests piled in, with students taking their seats on one reserved side of the room and parents and other audience members the other.
The youngsters portrayed characters and creatures from the folklore of cultures worldwide, which they had learned with Davis. Although the Ogre Awards are a high point of the second grade year, it was a bittersweet event as Davis is retiring after some 18 years of service at the close of this school year.
All but one of the awards are bestowed upon fairy tale characters, with a special award going to a real person. The 2012 special Ogre Award went to Carol Sosnowski, who works in Harker’s shipping and receiving and copy center.
“Ms. Sosnowski was chosen because of the excellent service she gives to the library and to the entire school,” said Davis. “She types every title of every book that the Bucknall library orders into a database. And we order lots of books!”
Accepting her award, Sosnowski said it was an unexpected honor, and marveled at the dedicated team both on hand and behind the scenes, comprising volunteer faculty and parents helping out with technical direction, music, costumes, videography and choreography.
Folk and fairy tales featured in this year’s award ceremony came from such well known, endearing stories as Russia’s “Bony Legs,” (Baba Yzaga), China’s “Two of Everything,” England’s “Lazy Jack” and West Africa’s “Anansi’s Hat-Shaking Dance.”
Adding to the event was a special guest appearance by Brian Larsen, Harker’s production manager, appearing as the giant from “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Towards the end of the show, the favorite story award went to the Russian folktale “Bony Legs.” Baba Yzaga, who elicited many laughs throughout the ceremony with her wonderfully witchy attitude, accepted the award on behalf of this story.
Concluding the event, Davis expressed how much she has enjoyed serving as librarian and running the Ogre Awards, and said that, despite her absence following retirement, the show – as the old saying goes – will go on!
Rohan Chandra, grade 11, recently received the news that he has been selected as a tenor for the All-National Honor Mixed Choir by the National Association for Music Education (NAfME). Chandra will participate in a three-day program this June that culminates in a concert at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., on June 24, during which he will perform with other top student musicians selected from all over the country.
Middle school mathematics chair Vandana Kadam is currently on an exchange trip in Shanghai to visit and instruct at the World Foreign Language Middle School.
Kadam has been observing and teaching classes, including four sections of grade 6 classes. “The students have been extremely receptive and that curiosity I see in them makes it fun for me to teach,” said Kadam. Her classes include a mix of Chinese students fairly proficient in English and those newer to English. She also has a Chinese co-teacher to translate her lessons if needed.
The language barrier, however, is proving itself to be mostly a non-issue. “[The Chinese students] were comfortable interacting with me as I used some manipulatives and played games with them,” said Kadam.
Coming up, Kadam will be teaching grades 7-10, and has been making lesson plans based on what teachers and students requested would be most beneficial.
Chris Nikoloff, head of school, has delivered the fifth and final lecture of his 2011-12 Cum Laude Society series based on author Alan Watts’ “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.”
Held in the Nichols Hall auditorium, Nikoloff’s recent address further explored topics revolving around the theme of fully knowing oneself, and opening up the mind to allow for the possibility of being much more than you think.
He told an audience of about 20 Harker students and several faculty members that he got the idea to speak on the philosophical topic of knowing oneself after spending a plane ride engrossed in reading Watts’ book, which is aimed at teenagers and young adults.
Nikoloff began his lecture with the disclaimer, “You don’t have to buy any of this, I’m just presenting his (Watts’) ideas.” He then carried on with a brief review of previous talks, before discussing such intriguing topics as being an “ego in a bag of skin”—a metaphor he said Watts likely uses not to “gross you out” but to jar us into questioning our purpose in being part of the universe.
He also examined the age-old argument between body and soul, or spirituality versus physicality. “We need the earth, the earth grounds us, but we are obviously more than just a body,” said Nikoloff.
Pondering whether existence itself can be for its own sake, he acknowledged how hard it is to “make sense out of a nonsensical world.” He closed his talk by reading a moving passage from Watts’ book that says it is we who evoke light out of the universe, because “without eyes to see there would be no sun.”
The Cum Laude Society hosts engaging talks and lecture series related to the lives of Harker students. Leading the discussions has clearly been a labor of love for Nikoloff, who took time out after his talk for an informal chat with his audience.
Joking around, he said he “likes to get together and talk about weird things” with the Harker Cum Laude Society. He then added on a more serious note that “these hours have been among the best of my year.”
Noah Levy, grade 12, earned the rank of Eagle Scout in a recent ceremony at Harker’s Nichols Hall. Levy completed requirements for 23 badges, thoguh only 21 are required, in addition to rebuilding a dilapidated footbridge/horsebridge in Belgatos Park in Los Gatos, as part of his Eagle Service Requirement. Levy has played varsity baseball for Harker for four years, now starting as a center fielder. He is also proficient in Japanese, after taking the language for six years at Harker and spending a summer learning abroad in Tokyo and living with a host family. Levy begins his first year at Tufts University, his first choice, in Boston in the fall.
Anooshree Sengupta, grade 6, recently participated in “Dear Mr. Henshaw,” a play presented by the California Theater Center (CTC) in Sunnyvale. The play, written by Newberry Award-winning author Beverly Cleary (Henry Huggins, Ramona Quimby), is about an author, Mr. Henshaw, who encourages Leigh, his number one fan, to write a journal to help him come to terms with the challenges of growing up, his parents’ recent divorce, and with being the new kid in school. The plays at CTC are a mix of adult and child actors. Sengupta participated in 15 performances of the play.
The Harker School will host the first Green Teen Summit, a student-organized conference for Bay Area high school students interested in environmental activism, on Sat., April 14, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The half-day conference, held at the upper school campus, will feature inspirational speakers and a wealth of resources to help young people get involved with environmental efforts at school and abroad. Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, will be one of two keynote speakers at the event. Called “the planet’s best green journalist” by Time magazine and “probably the country’s most important environmentalist” by the Boston Globe, McKibben has authored a dozen books on environmental issues, and started 350.org as a grassroots initiative to end the climate crisis. Since 2009, 350.org has organized 15,000 rallies in 189 countries. The conference’s second keynote speaker, Ethan Burke, is co-founder and director of operations for BioTour, a nonprofit organization that travels across the country via school buses modified to run on vegetable oil and solar energy. BioTour has crisscrossed the nation for two-and-a-half years, giving presentations on the environment at more than 150 universities, high schools and other venues. In addition to the speakers, the Green Teen Summit will offer training and resources provided by the Alliance for Climate Education, which organizes high school assemblies on climate-related issues. Students will also be able to enjoy lunch with green business leaders and attend workshops. The Green Teen Summit was organized by Harker students Daniela Lapidous and Shreya Indukuri, both grade 12, who received a grant in 2009 to improve Harker’s energy efficiency. They used the grant money to place insulating film on upper school classroom windows and start an organic garden. Later, they were instrumental in getting smart meters installed at the lower and upper school campuses to monitor and reduce energy usage. The students have received extensive press coverage for their efforts, and appeared at the Clinton Global Initiative last year as part of a keynote panel. This event is open to all high school students and campus green club advisors. A continental breakfast and vegetarian lunch is included in the ticket price. Tickets are $10 for students and $15 for adults (plus a nominal ticketing fee) and can be purchased at the Green Teen Summit’s Eventbrite page.