This article first appeared in the March 2010 Harker Quarterly. Green is busting out all over Harker, and not just because it is spring. On the upper school campus, the greenhouse is filled with flora cultivated by the Biology Club. The club has a crop-style garden planned with an herb section and is scouting the art department for a collaborator to help landscape the site.
The upper school HEART Club (Harker Environmental and Animal Rights Team) continues their ongoing effort of collecting recyclable paper from classrooms and offices around campus. The weekly collection visits are reminders to the whole campus both to recycle and to take individual action to help the environment.
In January, middle school students and teachers collected spare paper generated from routine printing runs, extra copies of homework, staff directives, etc., “so we could get a clear idea of what our monthly ‘waste’ is,” said Cindy Ellis, middle school head. The effort is part of a three-campus push to curb excess printing and paper use. The effort ran Jan. 4-29 and resulted in a 2.5 foot pile of paper that was then recycled as scratch paper at the Harker Math Invitational in mid-March.
Chris Nikoloff, head of school, initiated the overall paper-saving awareness effort and Jennifer Gargano, assistant head of school for academic affairs, took on the role of educating faculty on the effort at schoolwide faculty meetings. “Teachers have been heeding recommendations – requesting fewer color copies, asking the print shop to send digital files and returning the colored pages separating print jobs to the print shop for reuse,” said Gargano. “Our next step is to recruit students in the middle and upper schools to the effort.”
In mid-December, Harker was featured on “Eco Company,” a national TV program covering teens who are taking an active role in creating greener communities. The segment, aired on KTVU Channel 2, featured the upper school campus’ greenhouse and organic garden, the LEED gold-certified Nichols Hall, the lower school’s energy monitoring systems and more. Those who were unable to tune in can watch the segment on Eco Company’s Web site, www.eco-company.tv.
Two Harker faculty members teamed up with a nationally recognized information specialist and spoke to a full house March 8 at the California Association of Independent School’s conference in North Hollywood. With Debbie Abilock, the editor of American School Librarians Association journal “Knowledge Quest,” Donna Gilbert, upper school history department chair, and Sue Smith, upper school campus librarian described their three-year project to integrate information literacy skills into the history curriculum.
Smith, citing the 2008 Stanford Study of Writing which found that college freshmen are expected to write 60-100 pages, using 18 different kinds of writing, suggested preparatory schools must better prepare students for this level of scholarship. Their presentation reflected on the work Harker’s upper school history department has done over the past few years to serve this end. Gilbert and Smith described the work of teachers as they integrated term papers into Gr. 9 history curriculum and held regular meetings discussing obstacles and successes along the way. Abilock spoke about the motivational component of research and writing, and about how teachers can engage in continuous improvement in their practice. The presentation acknowledged the work of the entire Gr. 9 history team: Ruth Meyer, Ally Montana, MaiLien Nguyen, Julie Wheeler and former Harker teacher Heather Jackson.
This article originally appeared in the March 2010 Harker Quarterly.
Along with studying for history tests, meeting friends at the mall and signing up for drivers’ education classes, a trio of upper school girls have added “become agents of change” and “fight global warming” to their to-do lists.
Harker junior Olivia Zhu and sophomores Daniela Lapidous and Shreya Indukuri have already spun their interest in the environment into landing significant national awards, but continue their fights for environmental awareness and change.
In December 2009, Zhu became one of only four teens to represent the U.S. at the first Children’s Climate Forum (CCF), a precursor to the COP15, the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.
While there, Zhu and an international gathering of teens wrote a lengthy declaration on climate change for presentation to world leaders. About her experience at CCF, Zhu said, “I was definitely surprised at how much the delegates from other countries were looking toward the U.S. with regard to climate change policies. While I knew that they were concerned about the state of American emissions, it was interesting to see how almost every single question they asked the moderators was about the U.S. and how many of the other delegates had really done their homework on the issue.”
Now, Zhu is channeling her efforts through San Jose District One’s Youth Advisory Council (YAC), which serves as a sounding board for city councilman Pete Constant. The YAC is the same vehicle Lapidous and Indukuri, who won a grant to install smart meters and improve energy use at Harker last fall, are using to encourage the duplication of their efforts in the Silicon Valley.
Working together, the sophomores launched www.SmartPowerEd.org, a Web site built to help teens launch energy-saving programs at their schools. The site features a survey which teens fill out on behalf of their schools.
Once the survey is completed, Lapidous and Indukuri get to work analyzing the data, which they return to students interested in making presentations to their school administrators. Lapidous and Indukuri can even direct interested schools to funding resources.
“The great thing about the program is that it requires students’ involvement and interest in energy reduction which ultimately lowers the school’s carbon footprint,” explains Indukuri. “Most schools are very enthusiastic about having a smart energy solution because the energy they conserve means saving money for the school – money that can be used for other projects.”
Zhu has been an avid supporter of her schoolmates’ work. She’s already penned two articles for “Voice 1,” a publication of YAC – one about her CCF experience and the other promoting Indukuri and Lapidous’ undertaking. Zhu reported that news of the girls’ work got rave reviews in Copenhagen.
“Daniela and Shreya’s project really impressed the delegates from around the world as an example of small scale but effective change, and their current work with the YAC is an amazing example of how powerful local action can be,” said Zhu. “The CCF’s main goal was to instigate this type of community change, and it’s great that Harker and now San Jose can be a part of that because of their work.” So far, the results are encouraging.
“One of our goals is to get smart energy moving in at least 25 schools in California by the end of this summer,” explained Lapidous, who reports that they’ve already received completed surveys from three schools: Notre Dame, Bellarmine and Westmont high schools.
“Students like Olivia, Shreya and Daniela are inspiring,” said Butch Keller, upper school head, who has been following the girls’ efforts since last summer. “Everyone at Harker is so proud of what they’ve already done to combat the effects of climate change at every level. There’s no telling what these girls will accomplish in the future!”
Maybe the girls will put off learning to drive until they’ve polished off this global warming thing.
The upper school Biology Club, Key Club, Global Empowerment and Outreach Club (GEO ) and Harker Environmental and Animal Rights Team (HEART) have:
• placed stickers on towel dispensers in bathrooms at all three campuses asking users to use sparingly;
• grown an organic garden on campus which has already been served up for lunch by the upper school kitchen staff;
• invited a speaker from Alliance for Climate Education, which specializes in engaging high school students to become active in stopping climate change, to address the campus;
• checked tire pressures on campus and corrected them to suggested PSIs, offsetting an estimated 3,232.83 kg of carbon entering the atmosphere – equivalent to having planted 147 trees. This action earned HEART a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition on May 18, 2009, as winners of Rep. Mike Honda’s Go Green Contest. The same group won the award for technological innovation for their presentation at Santa Clara University’s Sustainability Decathlon on May 9, 2009.
• named charity: water GEO’s partner organization for the year, inviting speakers to address the campus on the need for clean drinking water throughout the world.
The middle school is decreasing its carbon footprint by: • recycling used cell phones to send to troops abroad;
• printing assignments only when necessary and opting for online copies;
• giving each student a water bottle and phasing out paper cups on campus;
• using grant money from the National Science Foundation. Pairs of students are choosing, researching and growing one edible annual in a 4×4 organic plot and harvesting the resulting plants for a San Jose soup kitchen. Additional compost comes from Harker lunch waste;
• collecting all unclaimed papers from faculty printers for one month, drawing attention to the amount of paper used and immediately recycled.
The lower school: • planted 200 daffodil bulbs to support Keep San Jose Beautiful Day;
• installed smart meters, with the initiative of two upper school students.
This article was originally published in the December 2009 issue of Harker Quarterly
Namrata Anand, Gr. 12, recently earned second place in the Intel Science Talent Search People’s Choice Awards. Anand was one of 40 national finalists in the Intel Science Talent Search, the winners of which were chosen by Intel and the Society of Science and the Public in March. Following the contest, an online vote was conducted at http://www.inspiredbyeducation.com/ to decide the People’s Choice winners.
Anand received a Dell Netbook for taking second place with her project, which studied the chemical composition of the Andromeda galaxy. The findings she made in the project could lead to the discovery of areas with a high likelihood of containing extraterrestrial life.
Sustainable site development? Check. Water savings? Check. Energy efficiency and materials selection? Check and check. How about indoor environmental quality? Also check. With attention paid to these criteria established by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) guidelines, plus an extra push by Harker students, Nichols Hall earned its gold LEED certification in July 2009.
Originally designed for silver certification, the building was put over the top by the initiative of students in Jeff Sutton’s AP Environmental Science classes. Eight groups of students designed displays for each of the eight LEED categories, and the two additional LEED points for displays and the education of visitors put the building in the gold category.
Not only is Harker the first school in Santa Clara County to earn gold LEED certification, but the building was named a runner-up at the 2009 Structures Awards held by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal, making it one of only two finalists in the Green Project of the Year – Private category.
“[Sustainability on campus] instills a sense of stewardship in the students who are going to inherit this planet,” said Mike Bassoni, facility manager, when asked about Harker’s green commitment. “We’re hoping to instill a sense of preservation in our students, so we practice what we preach and teach these kids firsthand what it means to be sustainable, and hopefully that will carry … throughout their lives ….”
Nichols Hall is only the latest in a long history of greening efforts at Harker. In the late 1980s, Howard and Diana Nichols (former president and head of school, respectively) had an electric car built, which Diana Nichols’ environmental science classes studied and rode in. “We were told that we wouldn’t get enough charge from the sun to use it for mileage….They were wrong. We drove it to school every day for about three or four years,” said Nichols.
She said they got about 12 miles a day on sunshine, the car went 65- 70 mph, was silent and required no maintenance except battery water. Nichols, who directed Harker’s efforts at the City of San Jose’s Earth Day Celebration in the early 1990s, displayed the car at several functions and was eager to disseminate the idea of solar energy for cars.
Diana Nichols’ green efforts also led to the initiation of the Our Trees Project, the goal of which “was to have students from different parts of the world work on the same problems,” said Nichols. Nichols wrote the program with then-technology director Sharon Meyers and brought in five public schools and the Tamagawa Gakuen school in Japan, Harker’s sister school to this day.
In time the project involved just Harker and Tamagawa until 2002, when the Neerja Modi School in Jaipur, India, joined in. “We wanted to model a new kind of education using the Internet to connect people in different locations and socioeconomic brackets …. We wanted to … increase our students’ understanding of environmental problems and empower them to face those problems,” Nichols said of the initiative. Today the Our Trees Project is going strong, taught as part of the Gr. 6 environmental science and computer science curricula.
Bassoni was well aware of Harker’s green history when Nichols Hall was begun. “Harker has had a strong support of environmental awareness and green thinking, so from day one … it was always our intent to design a building that supported our philosophy and had the potential to be LEED-certified,” he said.
Current students have joined the movement as well, and the school has accomplished phenomenal feats with its young activists leading the way. Inspired by a visit from photographer/environmentalist Rick Smolan, middle school students formed Blue Planet Group to raise money for clean drinking water awareness.
Population Studies and computer science classes have woven the cause into their curricula. The students’ efforts reached the ears of the nonprofit organization charity: water, whose founder, Scott Harrison, came to Harker to thank the students personally. In November of this year the upper school raised $10,000 for charity: water to build two wells in African villages with no clean water source.
Olivia Zhu, Gr. 11, was one of four students selected by UNICEF USA to participate in the first-ever Children’s Climate Forum, held together with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen, Denmark, in early December. Zhu’s application emphasized incentivizing investment in sustainable energies such as solar, wind and geothermal power, and modernizing electricity grids worldwide. “It’s important to get as much information about climate change policy out there as possible, as it has a major impact now and will have an even bigger one on future generations,” said Zhu.
Priya Bhikha, Gr. 12, and a team of upper school students are preparing a segment for Harker’s 2010 fashion show, with clothes made out of recycled materials. Bhikha has put out a call to all three campuses to help supply her with plastic bags, soda can tabs, paper clips, coffee filters, CDs, drinking straws and more to make her recycled fashions.
Shreya Indukuri and Daniela Lapidous, both Gr.10, took it upon themselves to apply for a grant to improve Harker’s energy efficiency. The girls, with the help of Valence Energy, successfully earned a $5,500 environmental grant, allowing Valance to install smart meters, devices for monitoring energy use, at the lower school campus. They also hope to apply some of the grant money towards an organic garden and window-insulating film at the upper school, and plans are underway to install smart meters at that campus, as well.
This fall the pair attended the Governors’ Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles as two of 25 climate youth leaders; they presented their findings to the assembly and enjoyed an audience with Gov. Schwarzenegger. UNICEF picked up on the girls’ story from there, and sent a camera crew from New York in October to interview them for a documentary on youth activism.
“If we don’t do anything about [global warming] now, we’ll really regret it in the future and history will label us as the generation who sat back and watched the world go up in flames. People will either be part of the problem or part of the solution, and it will take an extremely grueling period of effort by a lot of people to come up with even a fraction of a solution, but every contribution counts. We know the work is hard, and it does seem rather intimidating, but we’re just taking it one baby step at a time,” said Lapidous.
A gold, green building? Students ready to effect change? A strong history of environmental awareness that will continue long into the future? Check.
This article was originally published in the December 2009 issue of Harker Quarterly
In early April, two score members of the Harker community ran up the hills of San Francisco and along the lush Pacific shoreline in honor of beloved history teacher and basketball coach John Near, who died last September after a four-year battle against cancer.
The group ran in the Golden Gate Headlands Marathon, Half Marathon & Seven-MileRace. Inspired by Near’s emphasis on hard work and passion, seniors Aadithya Prakash and Arthi Padmanabhan and Padmanabhan’s mother, Radhika Padmanabhan, dedicated hours to organizing the event and rallying seniors, faculty and parents to join in the race. Even members of the community who could not run showed up for support and helped pledge and spread the word.
Even though it was Prakash’s first marathon, he ran through San Francisco in under four hours, placing seventh. For some – seniors Stefan Eckhardt, Arjun Mody, Sarah Teplitsky and Padmanabhan – it was their first half marathon, and Eckhardt finished fourth.
Prakash estimated about $7,000 in pledges; cash is still coming in. All the money will go to the John Near Excellence in History Education Endowment Fund established last October by his family.
Near’s wife, Pam Dickinson, director of Harker’s Office of Communication, and daughter Casey Near ’06 supported the team every step of the way, adding their pledge to the endowment fund. “You all represented the heart and soul of what Harker is with this event,” Dickinson said, “and John would be so proud.”
Norbert Lain, classics professor at Stanford University, was the latest guest of the Harker Cum Laude Society’s Lecture Series on April 7. Lain gave a talk on the practice of textual criticism, a crucial part of the process of reconstructing ancient documents, which involves finding and correcting errors in texts by examining their surrounding context and patterns.
“Texts get garbled all the time, and no matter how often we try to fix them, they still get garbled,” he said.
One of Lain’s particular interests is the work of the ancient Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus. “Textual critics are the people who have largely brought us the text of Catullus that we now have and for the most part we know to be right,” Lain said.
Lain illustrated what textual critics do by having students examine excerpts from various texts and correcting the errors found within them, ranging from typos to missing letters to incorrectly used words. Several passages required significant examination before their real meaning was discovered.
He also showed an example of a Catullus excerpt that he corrected, as well as corrections by others that have not yet been integrated into modern texts. “The first thing I do when a poem has a textual problem in it,” Lain said, “is I recite the poem hundreds of times with the mistake in it, then I go and memorize lots of other poems from Catullus and sometimes from other people. And then I just sit there. And then suddenly, ‘Oh! This one is like that one! Ah-hah!’ End of problem.”
After taking a sip from a glass Coke bottle, he added, “After 25 years or so.”
Ong is currently a third year student at UC San Diego pursuing a B.S. in biology and a B.A. in communications. She is the incoming COO of North America for The Triple Helix (TTH) for the 2010-11 school year and Harker will be the charter member of the new high school division of TTH.
The Triple Helix, Inc. is an international nonprofit organization with 27 chapters at prestigious universities, including Harvard, Cornell, Brown, Johns Hopkins and Yale, aiming to produce the highest quality undergraduate publications and showcase the voice of students on pressing modern issues in science.
Ong’s visit marks Harker’s initiation to TTH and she will be joined on stage by Julia Piper, outgoing CEO of TTH, and Jennifer Yang, outgoing executive director of internal affairs, both recent UC Berkeley graduates. As TTH members, Harker students will have the opportunity to develop critical analytical skills that will prepare them for the collegiate level of writing and editing, while collaborating closely with undergraduate students across the globe.
A San Jose native, Richard Kwant attended Harker middle and upper schools. He particularly enjoyed his experiences with the varsity soccer team and the Junior Classical League. Now a junior at Harvard, Kwant is majoring in chemistry and physics. He works in Harvard’s Whitesides lab, where his work involves molecular recognition, the hydrophobic effect, protein crystallography and calorimetry.
When not in lab or studying furiously, Kwant enjoys playing with the Harvard University Band at hockey and football games, flying RC planes and helicopters, flying a 1946 Aeronca Champ and hiking. After college Kwant hopes to attain a graduate degree in chemistry or physics.
Brian Ma is a bioengineering major at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) and said he has always been interested in biology and medicine. His current project began when he applied for a summer research program. “I found a mentor who was investigating regeneration in plants, and I was curious about regeneration and cloning in general, so I snapped at the offer and wrote up a proposal to apply for a research grant,” said Ma.
“My mentor and I came up with our project plan together, keeping in mind my complete lack of prior lab experience but also my academic background in biology and medicine, and the 10-week deadline that all summer research students must complete their project within. Everything went smoothly, so here I am this year to present the results of my work at the Harker Research Symposium,” he added.
In December 2009, 27 Japanese students took and passed the annual Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). Administered worldwide to evaluate and recognize language proficiency for non-native speakers, the JLPT tests vocabulary, listening, reading comprehension and grammar. Fifteen students passed level 4, the lowest skill level offered by JLPT, and 11 students passed level 3. These levels recognized the hours of work students spent learning grammar, comprehension and conversational skills.