This article originally appeared in the spring 2016 Harker Quarterly.
I am a reformed academic. And it is springtime. Shortly, I hope to show how these two statements are related.
First, regarding the academic statement: I believe in students learning academic content from a teacher who is a subject matter expert and who loves children. I want students to graduate knowing the difference between compose and comprise, what moves a demand curve, why we might need to find the derivative of an equation, the structure of DNA, the principle causes of the Great Depression and how to conjugate verbs in another language.
Nothing warms my heart more than when a student in class asks an extremely nuanced, insightful question like, “Is synesthesia a physical or psychological phenomenon?”
Yes, I believe in problem-solving and critical thinking, but I believe these skills rest on a solid foundation of academic knowledge. I believe it is folly to say that students only need to know how “to think” because they can Google everything else. Without context and background knowledge about the Civil War or photosynthesis, how does a student know what to Google in the first place?
And it is springtime. How is spring related to being an academic? I can explain with the help of a Zen poem: “In the landscape of spring, there is neither better nor worse. The flowering branches grow naturally, some long, some short.” Does that clear things up?
Now that it is spring, flowers, trees, everything is starting to bloom. Each blooms at its own pace, some early, some late. Do we judge the early bloomers, the flowers in full bloom, as superior? The flowers and branches that have yet to fully bloom – are they inferior?
Back to academics. I came relatively late to academics. In my junior year in high school, I began to work hard because someone told me I had to go to college and I’d better prepare.
I started to fall in love with poetry and calculus. Who knew? Interestingly enough, the love followed the hard work – not the other way around. And the work followed the fear of not being prepared for college. So I owe my being an academic to fear. But that fear quickly turned into love and no one, not even I, could have predicted it would happen.
When will the students among us bloom? Does everyone have to bloom by the age of 14? 18? How many blooms does a lifetime get? Students, like flowers, need good soil, nurturing, sunlight and sometimes a stick in the ground for structure, but their blooming is unpredictable, even by the student.
We cannot be judgmental if a student hasn’t bloomed yet. Neither can we force a blooming when it is not yet time. Nor should we have preconceived notions about when or how a blooming will happen. Flowering branches grow naturally, some long and some short.
I am a reformed academic. And it is springtime. Who knew exactly how or when either would happen? We have ideas about when these things will happen. But reality has its own ideas, and they spring forth wonderfully and unpredictably all the time. Some long, some short.
This article originally appeared in the fall 2015 Harker Quarterly.
My first boss in education, a middle school principal in the Hayward public school system, used to flit around campus on the first day of school saying that when he stopped getting first-day butterflies, he would leave education. I think this “tummy check” is good for educators.
The beginning of the school year after a long summer is a time of possibility, a time of excitement. Friends, teachers, students, parents all reunite, coming together toward the common purpose of bringing out the best in the children.
Schools are a unique mix of “now” and “forever.” We want students and teachers to have as rich an experience as possible, to focus on the process, the journey, the “now”; yet we are all preparing for the future, to help students take their deep learning and make a meaningful impact on the world to, in the words of Henry Adams, “affect eternity.”
At the beginning and end of summers, I often wonder what happened to the year-round school trend. Summer is still here, even though, as Time pointed out in its recent article “Who Killed Summer Vacation?” summer feels shorter to all of us. Some schools across the country have adopted a year-round schedule with intermittent breaks, but the trend hasn’t seemed to sweep the educational system as anticipated. There are plenty of schools with a traditional calendar that includes vacations.
There may be many reasons why this is the case – an entrenched summer programs industry, family vacations, school budgets – but regardless of the reasons for summer’s persistence, there remain, I believe, cognitive benefits from the break summer provides. We now understand that much learning is consolidated during sleep; that time away from the grind can bring fresh insight; that top athletes cycle their training in peaks and valleys to allow the body to heal from exertion.
There are two types of learning, and we hope our children experience both: cumulative and transformational. Cumulative learning is the most familiar: we learn the events that led up to the Civil War, the grammatical components of a foreign language, the steps in a geometry proof, the solubility table. Transformational learning is when the learner doesn’t just accumulate knowledge but becomes a different learner altogether.
In transformational learning, perhaps the student falls in love with a subject; has an insight into an historical event or a scientific phenomenon; learns how to learn; takes ownership of his or her studies; sees the connections between two disciplines; discovers what he or she wants to study in college. Both cumulative and transformational learning are necessary, but cumulative learning is a step on the student’s journey while transformational learning is a leap.
So the opening of the new school year – after a long or short summer – is a magical time, an exhilarating time, a time of possible transformation. No one can predict when a child will hit a growth spurt, either physically or cognitively or otherwise, but we can nurture, like a garden, the conditions for growth. We want for our children the best in learning and growth, and we hope for them, as we do our educators, the butterflies that this time of year brings.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Each year, graduating seniors who have attended Harker since kindergarten – known as “lifers” – gather for a special dinner at Head of School Chris Nikoloff’s home to celebrate their lives as Harker students. Following the baccalaureate ceremony, the 25 lifers boarded a bus bound for the special event, where they reminisced by looking at their Harker application photos, enjoyed a cake emblazoned with these photos and even took photos in their original kindergarten advisory groups.
This year’s lifers are Manon Audebert, Vikas Bhetanabhotla, Kianna Bisla, Lauren Cali, Allen Cheng, Darian Edvalson, Urvi Gupta, Helena Huang, John Hughes, Saachi Jain, Zina Jawadi, Silpa Karipineni, Anna Kendall, Michael Kling, Sean Knudsen, Gaurav Kumar, Anna Levine, Kevin Mohanram, Kevin Moss, Stephan Pellissier, Ariana Shulman, Vikram Sundar, Laura Thacker, Brian Tuan and Andrew Zhu.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
In early June a promotion ceremony was held for Harker’s grade 8 class, marking the end of students’ middle school years.
Kicking off the touching ceremony, Cindy Ellis, middle school head, welcomed the eighth graders and congratulated them on reaching this important milestone and beginning a new stage in their academic lives.
Julie Pinzás, middle school Spanish teacher and Class of 2018 advisory dean, gave a moving farewell address to the soon-to-be upper school students, encouraging them to welcome the many opportunities that await them over the next four years.
Next up was a beautiful performance of the song “Home” by the middle school vocal groups Harmonics and Vivace.
A welcome address to the Class of 2018 was delivered by rising senior Sarah Bean, who will be next year’s upper school ASB president.
Finally, members of the grade 8 class received their promotion certificates from Chris Nikoloff, head of school, and Ellis, who made some warm closing remarks. A special happening, not listed in the program, followed as the eighth graders surprised teachers with their own special “thank-you” slideshow, which they had secretly created earlier. The slideshow included numerous memorable moments shot by the students throughout the school year.
The ceremony concluded, as in years past, with the singing of “The Harker School Song,” followed by a recessional and well-attended reception held in the amphitheater.