The Modern and Classical Languages department held its eighth annual Honor Societies Induction Ceremony on April 19. The ceremony began with an inspiring talk by alumna Katherin Hudkins, ’06, who spoke about studying Spanish at both Harker and Smith College, as well as her life-changing experience living in Ecuador during her junior year at Smith. Hudkins highly recommended that the students take advantage of study abroad programs at some point during their education.
After Hudkins spoke, each National Honor Society (French, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin and Spanish) made a short cultural presentation, which included beautiful songs in French, Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish. The Latin group performed a humorous skit. New members were then inducted into each society, which has its own specific criteria set by the national office of the organization. “In general, all induct a very select group of students with high averages in their language courses,” said Abel Olivas, upper school Spanish teacher. Congratulations to all of the students for this achievement.
New inductees to each National Honor Society are as follows:
Japanese: Erik Andersen, Tiffany Jang, Victoria Liang, Catherine Manea, Jessica Shen, Indica Sur, Lorraine Wong, Gene Wong, Iris Xia and Wilbur Yang.
Latin: Jenny Chen, Michael Cheng, Jonathan Cho, Nik Datuashvili, Richard Fan, Jason Kuan, Andrew Luo, Ramakrishnan Menon, Suchita Nety, Laura Pedrotti, Anuj Sharma, Pranav Sharma, Shannon Su, Ashvin Swaminathan, Ravi Tadinada and Molly Wolfe.
Mandarin: Sally Chen, Lucy Cheng, James Du, Eric Kong, Michelle Lo, Moneesha Mukherjee, Derek Tzeng and Patrick Yang.
Spanish: Sarika Asthana, Appu Bhaskar, Rohan Bopardikar, Nicole Dalal, Sharanya Haran, Sarah Howells, Max Isenberg, Isha Kawatra, Revanth Kosaraju, Jeffrey Kwong, Andrew Liang, Rahul Madduluri, Priyanka Mody, Alexander Najibi, Nikhil Narayen, Sankalp Raju, Sona Sulakian, Cindy Tay, Anne West and Albert Wu.
Upper school Latin students scored big on national Latin and Greek exams, which were taken in March. In all, students won 24 gold medals, 13 silver medals, 12 magna cum laude certificates and six cum laude certificates.
In Latin I, Cobi Ashkenazi, Gr.9, won a gold medal, with silver medals going to fellow freshmen Apurva Tandon, Andrew Luo and Christopher Sund. Rising senior Karen Wong won a cum laude certificate.
Gold medals in Latin II were won by Eric Henshall, Gr. 10, and Simon Orr, Gr. 9, while Ram Menon, Gr. 9, and Samantha Walker, Gr. 10, earned silver. Matthew Carpenter and Nathan Hoffman, both Gr. 10, won magna cum laude, and Gr. 9 students Piyush Prasad and Robert Deng won cum laude.
Freshmen Sean Fernandes and Rahul Desirazu won gold medals in Latin III, where Eric Zhang, Molly Wolfe and Katherine Woodruff, all Gr. 9, earned silver medals. Magna cum laude winners in this category were Nisha Bhikha and Ravi Tadinada, both Gr. 9, Gerard Glasauer, Gr. 10, and recent graduate Lauren Guerra.
Harker took more gold medals in Latin III Honors Prose than in any other category, with Gr. 9 students Ashvin Swaminathan, Jonathan Cho, Nik Datuashvili, Pranav Sharma, Michael Cheng, Richard Fan, Shannon Su and Saloni Gupta, Gr. 11, all earning top honors. Suchita Nety and Anuj Sharma, Gr. 9, took home the silver, and Vivian Li, Gr. 10, earned a cum laude certificate.
In Latin IV Prose, Robert Maxton, Gr. 10, won gold, and fellow sophomores Ila Dwivedi and Christophe Pellissier both won magna cum laude awards.
Ramya Rangan, Gr. 10, was a big winner in Latin IV Poetry, earning a gold medal and a Perfect Paper award. Other gold medal winners in this category were sophomores Alex Hsu, Ananth Subramaniam and Jessica Lin, and rising seniors Justine Liu and April Luo. Earning silver medals were Max Lan, Gr. 11, and Prag Batra, Gr. 10. Jason Kuan, Christine Hsu, both Gr. 10, and Supraja Swamy, Gr. 11, won magna cum laude certificates and Philip Oung, Gr. 10, won cum laude.
Graduate Anjali Menon won a gold medal in Latin V, while Alex Han, also Class of 2010, took silver and Colby Rapson, another recent graduate, won cum laude.
Recent graduate Brandon Araki was one point shy of having a perfect paper but still won the gold in Latin VI, as did fellow grads Sohini Khan and Maggie Woods.
In the national Greek exam, Menon earned a blue ribbon in the Greek Prose category, the highest honor, and missed earning a perfect paper by a single point. Menon also earned a red ribbon award in Greek Tragedy, missing another perfect paper by three points.
Upper school physics students recently took first place in their region in the annual American Association of Physics Teachers’ Physics Bowl. The United States is comprised of 15 regions and Harker ranked third across all regions. Approximately 4,500 students from 200 schools took the examination across the United States, Canada, China and the Republic of Korea.
Harker competes in the division two portion of the competition, which is for students who have completed a year of physics. All of our students enrolled in AP physics B and C take the examination. They do not do any special preparation for the test, other than their already rigorous class work, making their accomplishments all the more impressive.
Ramya Rangan, Gr. 10, recently learned that she received a perfect score on her Level 4 Poetry National Latin Exam. Of the close to 7,000 students who took the exam, only 81 received perfect scores, slightly more than 1 percent. Harker students have a history of strong performance on Latin exams and we are proud to congratulate Rangan for upholding this tradition of excellence.
Gr. 4 and Gr. 5 students posted their highest scores ever during Harker’s annual in-house Math League contest in May. This year, 41 fifth-graders had scores of 28 or higher, with 13 students earning perfect scores. Gr. 5 contestants who scored perfectly were: Steven Cao, Ryan Chen, Cuebeom Choi, Rishab Gargeya, Andrew Gu, Conor Martin, Kshithija Mulam, Eric Pei, Divya Rajasekharan, Aneesh Samineni, Austin Tuan, Peter Wu and David Zhu.
The fifth-graders with a score of 28 or 29 were Sana Aladin, Varun Baldwa, Sarah Baz, Brandon Chow, Quentin Delepine, Aditya Dhar, Elan Friedland, Kedar Gupta, Joyce Huang, Emaad Hussain, Aashish Jain, Preethi Kandappan, Alexander Lam, Lauren Liu, Nikhil Manglik, Anuva Mittal, Judy Pan, Albert Pun, Alayna Richmond, Venkat Sankar, Manan Shah, Scott Song, Meilan Steimle, Ed Tischler, Lindsey Trinh, Misha Tseitlin, Derrick Wang and Edmond Wu.
A total of 29 Gr. 4 students scored 28 or higher, with four of them having perfect scores. Perfect scorers in the fourth grade were Adrian Chu, Vivian Huang, Rajiv Movva and Shaya Zarkesh. Students who had scores of 28 or 29 were: Niko Bhatia, Rahul Bhethanabotla, Megan Cardosi, Siddarth Chari, Kate Chow, Griffin Ellis, Rose Guan, Alan Hughes, Julia Huang, Rishi Iyer, Tanay Kamat, Ania Kranz, Jerrica Liao, Edgar Lin, Taylor Kohlmann, Michael Kwan, Victor Shin, Aadith Srinivasan, Sahana Srinivasan, Justin Su, Shushant Thyagoraj, Gary Tsai, Jessica Wang, Roy Yi and Kaitlin Zhu.
Teachers from around the Bay Area came to the Harker Teacher Institute at the Saratoga campus last month to learn more about technology and methods available to help them improve their classroom effectiveness.
During a wide variety of sessions, teachers learned about such skills as using digital content and grading quizzes with Moodle, creating collaborative documents in Google Docs, making high-quality graphics with free software and even filming documentaries.
In contrast to last year’s Teacher Institute, no keynote speaker was featured this year. Participants preferred “to spend most of their time on things that would make a difference in their classes next year rather than hearing about things to come,” explained Dan Hudkins, director of instructional technology.
Hudkins said this year’s institute was “very smooth and successful,” thanks to the careful coordination and arrangements made by Harker’s instructional technology staff of Fred Triefenbach, Lisa Diffenderfer and Angela Neff.
This year Harker middle school students competed in the Department of Energy (DOE) National Science Bowl for the first time. The annual contest aims to foster a love of math and science among the nation’s middle and high school students. In this debut appearance our middle school sent not one but three teams to compete. Each team consisted of a minimum of four students and a coach.
Harker students matched their wits against other area middle school students at the regional competition, held at National Hispanic University in San Jose.
The teams battled each other “Jeopardy”-style, where they were quizzed on their knowledge of math and science. A round-robin format was used to determine the winner in each region. The winning team from each region then went on to a national competition in Washington, D.C. Harker students did an excellent job this first time out and we look forward to seeing more students compete in the future.
As summer rolls on, Harker continues to appear in news outlets nationwide. Stay tuned throughout the month for more updates!
Investors.com — July 1, 2010: Harker is mentioned as one of three U.S. high schools where “it’s cool to be smart,” and is identified as a top school in the “STEM” subjects: science, technology, engineering and math. The story also mentions Harker’s quality facilities, knowledgeable, attentive faculty and the numerous awards acquired during the 2009-10 school year. Chris Nikoloff, head of school, was interviewed for the story and said, “There really isn’t any limit to how far a student can pursue a passion.”
San Jose Mercury News — July 19, 2010: The newspaper has printed a brief story about the middle school debate students reaching the finals of the National Middle School Forensics Tournament in Des Moines, Iowa. The tournament featured more than 450 students from 20 states.
On May 17, mothers of the 2010 senior class were celebrated during the Senior Moms Luncheon in the Nichols Hall atrium. This time-honored event once again brought mothers together to socialize, catch up with longtime friends and share the memories of their children’s times at Harker. Dozens of mothers, many of them the parents of Harker “Lifers,” took the podium one by one to address their friends, often through tears and laughter, and thank Harker for the wonderful opportunities it offered to their children. Congrats, moms!
Graduates, friends and family were once again greeted by gorgeous weather and surroundings at the Mountain Winery on May 22 for the upper school’s ninth annual commencement ceremony. The Harker Chamber Orchestra, directed by Chris Florio, officially began the ceremony by welcoming the graduates with “Pomp and Circumstance.” Following the processional, Susan Nace directed the 2010 Graduation Chorus in her arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Following a brief welcome speech by Butch Keller, upper school head, salutatorian Adam Perelman addressed his classmates in a light-hearted speech; Andrew Zhou, who, as valedictorian, traditionally would have spoken, was not able to attend the ceremony because he was attending the U.S. Physics Olympiad team training in Maryland (see p. 7).
“I was so excited when I found out that I had the chance to speak today. And that’s not just because [college counselor] Mr. [Kevin] Lum Lung promised me twenty bucks if I mentioned his name in this speech,” Perelman joked. He went on to list the many accomplishments of the Class of 2010, which included but were not limited to winning consecutive spirit championships and running a marathon to honor John Near, the much-loved 30-year veteran history teacher who passed away last September (see p. 48). “What I’m trying to say is that, we’re kind of a big deal, Class of 2010,” Perelman quipped.
The speech got another big laugh when Perelman reflected on how much the class had changed since freshman year. “A lot of you probably remember that back then, I looked a lot more like this!” he exclaimed, donning an afro wig.
Before closing, Perelman thanked the Harkerteachers and families who helped him and his classmates become the people they are. He then thanked his fellow graduates “for making high school so unforgettable.”
After much applause, Catherine Snider conducted the 2010 Graduation Chorus, singing the Taylor Hicks hit “Do I Make You Proud,” before the day’s keynote speaker, San Jose Mercury News columnist Scott Herhold, took the podium. In his speech, Herhold made special note of the accomplishments that the graduating seniors had achieved as part of a collaborative effort. He recognized several students by name and recapped many of the accomplishments they achieved together in areas such as community service, sports and performing arts.
In another yearly tradition, graduate and outgoing National Honor Society president Anjali Menon then passed the Lamp of Knowledge to rising senior and new NHS president Ashtyn Ka. Chris Nikoloff, head of school, then went to the stage to give his customary parting words to the senior class (see p. 4) before individually awarding the diplomas to the class of 2010, along with Keller and Naomi Schatz, class dean and psychology teacher. Nikoloff and Jennifer Gargano, assistant head of school for academic affairs, then said their closing words and released doves, before the Harker Chamber Orchestra performed the recessional piece, “March Heroique” by Saint-Saens, to bring the ceremonies and a great senior year to an end!