Rising freshman Kabir Ramzan and rising sixth grader Ameera Ramzan have been working to raise funds in support of Black Girls Code and Second Harvest Food Bank. To encourage donations through their GoFundMe page, the siblings created a virtual music concert featuring themselves playing various pieces on piano, flute and violin. Two of the three instruments featured in the concert were taught to the Ramzans as part of the Harker music program. In addition, their company, ArtShackCrafts, will send a gift of an artisan bracelet for all donations over $50.
The two created ArtShackCrafts to sell artisan crafts to support philanthropic efforts about which they are passionate. These causes have included assisting detained immigrant children through the ACLU and aiding California wildfire victims through the American Red Cross.
The contest tasked students with writing a persuasive essay using both The New York Times and other sources. Winning essays were published in the Times’ Learning Network. The contest received more than 7,000 submissions from middle and high school students.
Harker’s team of rising juniors Camilla Lindh, Simren Kochhar and Ishaan Parate reached the semifinals in the 2020 INCubatoredu National Student Pitch contest. This annual contest invites teams from INCubatoredu member schools to submit videos detailing their proposed businesses, how they work and the value they bring. Teams are nominated by their schools and are required to have completed the INCubatoredu program, a yearlong course in which high school students develop a startup, secure funds and deliver a pitch. The Harker team’s proposed business, titled “H2OOT” (pronounced “hoot”) offered a way for users to monitor water usage at their homes to both save money and address water shortages.
The full video of the students’ pitch can be viewed below or on YouTube.
In April, middle school librarian Bernie Morrissey hosted a video chat with author Rex Ogle, whose novel, “Free Lunch,” won the middle school’s first Tournament of Books, an event in which books were placed in a tournament bracket and voted on by students. Ogle, who previously worked in comics with stints at Marvel and DC, talked about how he became a writer, how long it takes him to write, his work in comics and his follow-up to “Free Lunch.” He also read from “a story in real time” that he has been writing about a middle schooler’s experience being quarantined during the COVID-19 pandemic. The entire chat is viewable via the embedded YouTube video.
Sometime soon, an array of teenagers in Africa, with lovingly packed boxes of K-5 math textbooks hoisted on their shoulders, will complete the final steps of a journey that started with a Harker student’s efforts to blend sustainability with service to the world’s poor.
Driven to find ways to propel positive change, rising senior Sachi Bajaj started a nonprofit entity called Me2U Foundation last year focused on reclaiming various items for use abroad, setting in motion of a chain of events that, among other things, diverted nearly 1,000 used textbooks from the waste stream for the use of mostly rural libraries serving an estimated 45,000 African children.
“I want to show people that anyone can do this, even if you are just in high school like I am,” said Bajaj. “We truly can make a difference, and the results are right in front of us. It is unbelievable to think that 700 books, which possibly could have reached the landfills, went to children who do not have sufficient resources to even learn, something that myself and others may take for granted.”
The difficulty of transporting learning resources to remote communities disadvantaged by lack of access to textbooks was overcome in large part by The Harker School’s contribution of funds to finance the shipping of the books, first to New Orleans and then most likely to Malawi, but possibly instead to Ghana, depending upon available space on a July trans-Atlantic container ship. More than 200 additional textbooks were sent free of charge to Thrift Books, a socially conscious, for-profit organization that re-sells books on the secondary market.
Harker library director Lauri Vaughan, who has overseen other efforts to connect books with readers, proclaimed the arrangement “a win for the environment and for all those readers who will use these books to learn valuable skills.”
Claire Hubel, container manager for The African Library Project, designated Bajaj, Me2U and The Harker School global literacy champions, noting that the Bajaj was “absolutely instrumental in making all this happen.”
Bajaj’s foundation got its start in 2019 as a project aiming to reduce waste and share resources such as clothing, shoes and toys, then grew this year to focus on books, 320 million of which are estimated to be wasted annually.
“Over the course of five months, I worked very closely with Ms. Vaughan to make sure that these books would be redirected from landfills to the underprivileged in a sustainable manner,” Bajaj said. ” I would send lists and lists of updates to Ms. Vaughan about possible organizations, but many of them simply would not work out. At this time, my organization did not have sufficient funding to ship over this many textbooks.”
Finding the African Library Project in May revived Bajaj’s hope that the books would find a proper home after all. The African Library Project distributes books to libraries across Malawi and six other countries in Africa. It does so from the Port of New Orleans, however, so the not so small matter of transporting the jumbo load of elementary education materials remained a hurdle. Harker stepped in with $960 to finance the books’ voyage.
Harker sustainability czar Greg Lawson called the project “a remarkable undertaking by Sachi and Lauri,” adding, “It is noteworthy that this undertaking began as Sachi’s brainchild, but that Lauri saw the vision and helped her do the work within the administration of the school to bring this to fruition. Hopefully these texts will land in the lap of a student whose curiosity will be piqued and will endeavor to learn and grow because of this exposure. These books may become ‘a gift that keeps on givin’’ and if they do, all the effort will be worthwhile – and that’s not even taking into account the sustainability element here!”
Bajaj distinguished herself through her perseverance amid the numerous obstacles attending such enterprises, Vaughan said. “Where others have good ideas, but struggle to implement them, Sachi stayed with this and I am so happy with how it is turning out.”
Hubel, who brought her daughter to campus to help Vaughan pack the volumes, worked with partners in Malawi to plan distribution of the gently used tomes to 45 libraries in the landlocked southeast African nation, where literacy has been on the decline, currently falling below 70 percent for males and at just 55 percent for females.
“There is a very small chance that this collection of math books may be held until our Ghana container (which will be shipping in the fall) on the off-chance that the Malawi container is full,” Hubel said. “The container is going to be very full, and these books may be loaded last, since they represent a supplement for many schools, and we don’t want to send these at the expense of a single school getting their full library.”
Regardless of which destination the books reach, they form a foundation of hope that acquisition of STEM skills can help lift poor children from poverty, enabling them to contribute to the development of their homeland.
“Our procedure is to fill a shipping container for each country we are working with, and the container to Malawi will already be carrying 60 libraries of 1,000 books each,” Hubel said. “Luckily we have just started adding STEM supplements to many of the libraries that we send to, so we decided that this donation would comprise a one box STEM supplement to each of the 45 primary grade schools in this container. In order to qualify for a library from the African Library Project, a school has to fill out an application demonstrating its need. Most of the schools we work with are in rural communities, and many do not have any books at all. Each box of textbooks that we packed at Harker was sorted to contain a full, leveled math curriculum from K-5th (or 6th) grade. As such, each box will be a valuable resource for the school receiving it, and will likely be used by teachers in support of their math instruction.
“The books that Harker donated so generously were almost new and very well-made. They have many years of use in them, in the careful hands that will receive them. These books will be used by teachers in 45 schools, reaching 45,377 students in all … and will then be used by each incoming grade as well. Using books this way will touch an immense number of lives!”
Harker rising sophomore Rupert Chen recently created a website, called covid9teen, that lets teenagers from around the world share their stories and perspectives on life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chen hopes to document the experience of teenagers, as he feels that too much media coverage has focused on the perspective of adults. The site features an interactive map that users can click on to see the stories that have been shared. “The idea for the website came to me as I read the news about the pandemic,” he said. “That news was, not surprisingly, largely focused on the experiences of adults and how they were coping during this crisis. Even when stories focused on the experiences of teenagers, they were filtered through the eyes of adults.”
Since launching the website, Chen has received submissions from many countries, including Venezuela, Kenya, Italy, Russia, Singapore and New Zealand. “I have found that many teens quarantined at home have been eager to share their perspectives,” he said. His work also led to a collaboration with Stanford University’s Life in Quarantine project. “As the archive grows, I’m hopeful that it will play some role, however small, in writing the history of the pandemic,” Chen noted.
During the spring semester, John Owens MS ‘85, circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, made special appearances at Harker classes via Zoom. In May, Owens gave a presentation of the Ninth Circuit’s history and geographic boundaries to lower school history teacher Eric Leonard’s grade 3 students. Much of the class time was set aside for the students to ask questions, but due to time constraints, Owens agreed to answer questions that students posted online.
In April, he visited Carol Green’s AP U.S. Government and Politics class to discuss his background, including his career in law, his duties as a circuit judge and memories of his time at Harker. He also answered questions from Harker students on topics such as memorable cases he has presided over and advice for soon-to-be-graduates.
Last week, middle school science teacher Tamar Hawk invited environmental activist Tiffany Duong ‘02 to speak with her students about careers in environmental advocacy. Duong, who attended Harker from first grade through grade 12 and was a member of the upper school’s first graduating class, delivered an overview of how she became interested in environmental issues and how her career changed in the ensuing years. She discovered her love for the topic while attending an assembly on the rainforest as a fifth grader. “I wanted to be the person who was standing in front of the bulldozers at the Amazon,” she recalled.
After graduating from UCLA, Duong worked as a renewable energy lawyer, handling contracts and negotiations for solar arrays and wind turbine farms, including California’s Tehachapi Wind Farm and Ivanpah Solar Power Tower. Duong briefly discussed why more states don’t use renewable energy, explaining that issues such as cost and space are considerable hindrances. “There’s not always a storage capability for renewable energy, which makes it hard for some areas to utilize renewable energy,” she said. Politics, including lobbies from major industries, also play a large role. “A lot of people … don’t necessarily believe that climate change is even happening or that this is an issue,” she said.
Duong later discovered that she wanted to be closer to the environment she was working to save, and made a career switch. In 2016, she headed to the Peruvian Amazon, researching biodiversity along newly opened areas of the rainforest, documenting existing species and discovering new ones in order to prevent encroachment from miners and loggers. Her work in ocean advocacy began in 2017, as she helped in the effort to ban drift net fishing in California and tagged sharks in Costa Rica to provide evidence of migratory swimways in order to protect aquatic life. In 2018 she worked to restore coral reefs in the Florida Keys.
Duong continues to go on expeditions in addition to working as an environmental journalist. She advised the students that there is no single most effective way to be an advocate, using her own career as an example. “I’ve worked in law, policy, education and now media, and I think the most effective thing will be the one that you do,” she said. “Whatever you want to do, try it.”
As the 2019-20 school year drew to a close, the upper school orchestra and jazz band recorded special performances dedicated to the Class of 2020. Student musicians rigorously practiced their parts and recorded them individually, and music coach Paul Woodruff, an engineer, edited the submitted individual parts to create the final product.
“I can not tell you how lucky and thankful we are for the support of this project from the beginning,” said upper school instrumental music teacher Dave Hart. “As we worked to create an online curriculum for the kids in all the instrumental groups, it really became clear that we all yearned for collaboration that orchestra and jazz band provides on a daily basis when we rehearse in person.”
The orchestra performed an original piece composed and conducted by sophomore Spencer Cha, which features all of the 31 seniors in the orchestra. The jazz band recorded Charlie Parker’s “Bloomdido” and the standard “Misty” by Erroll Garner.
Hart gave special recognition to Woodruff, whose expertise made the project possible. “Paul was able to bring our vision to reality, which was no small undertaking!” Hart exclaimed. “I also want to highlight Spencer’s hours of work to create such a thoughtful and musical composition that features all the seniors. He started working on this last summer and worked on edits with me and other teachers throughout the school year.“
Videos of the performances are embedded below and can also be viewed at Harker’s Vimeo page.
In May, lower school science teacher Enni Chen’s kindergarten and grade 2 students submitted photos and videos of experiments they conducted at home. For a lesson in capillary action – the mechanism by which liquid flows through narrow spaces – students including kindergartner Nora Yan placed paper towels into cups of colored water, resulting in highly colorful creations.
While learning about electricity, second graders learned how to build their own circuits, and student Corinne Chou used her circuit to make a very clever alarm that makes a noise when tripped by an opening door. In another lesson, second graders learned how placing varying amounts of water in glasses causes them to vibrate at different frequencies. Students Sophie Cai, Megan Lin and Sophie Croswhite created videos of themselves playing tunes using arrangements of glasses filled with different amounts of water.