Harker students Krish Maniar, grade 10, and Kabir Ramzan, grade 9, together with Saratoga High sophomore Shafin Haque, collected a series of awards at multiple international hack-a-thons that took place the weekend of Jan 16. Over a 24-hour period, the trio developed a web application called DisastersAI that harnesses artificial intelligence and machine learning to better predict and prepare for natural disasters such as earthquakes, wildfires and hurricanes. The team’s goal was to create a positive impact on the world through their programming skills. The DisastersAI app has multiple features that can guide government officials and citizens with planning and impact analysis. The team was awarded Best Environmental Sustainability Hack at Hack the Northeast Beyond (among 1,064 participants), People’s Choice Award and Top Five Overall at ThetaHacks (among 402 participants), Best Machine Learning Hack and Most Creative Award at Orion Hacks (among 192 participants) and Innovative Project Award at STHacks (among 140 participants). The students have posted more information about their project and an overview video on Devpost.
On Wednesday, the annual grade 3 pajama and book drive came to a close, with 156 pairs of pajamas and 406 books collected. The goods will be donated to the Pajama Program, an organization that will distribute them to children living in shelters and temporary housing.
The annual assembly celebrating the effort was held virtually this year, but key parts of the tradition remained, including students wearing pajamas and a special story reading by Butch Keller, upper school division head, who read Pat Zietlow Miller’s “Be Kind” to the students in attendance.
Grade 7 science teacher Raji Swaminathan recently published her second book about the elements, titled “The Alkaline Earth Metals – They Rock and Bone!” The illustrated book follows Atom, who is gifted a magical periodic table for her birthday and is transported (with her dog, Electron) to each element’s domain to learn more about them. The book, which also contains illustrations by Swaminathan, takes Atom to locations including Utah, California, Greece and Scotland. Proceeds from the book, which is available through Amazon, are being donated to children’s charities.
Love noted the importance of designating February as Black History Month “to honor the history and creativity and brilliance and love of Black people,” adding that “This is a very interesting time to be having a conversation about Black history and justice in a pandemic after the summer we’ve had,” referencing the massive wave of protests and unrest that took place following the police killing of George Floyd in May of last year.
One part of Love’s presentation displayed Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of Ruby Bridges on her way to school after the passing of school integration in New Orleans, escorted by U.S. Marshals, with a racial slur scrawled on the wall next to her. “What we don’t talk about is that Ruby Bridges is 66 years old,” Love said, illustrating the point that images of the racial segregation and oppression do not represent ancient history. “This is not a long, long, long time ago. This is one generation removed.”
Love used the example to show that racism is a structure still alive and well in American society, and that Black Americans continue the fight to make Americans realize their humanity. As examples, she pointed out that white medical students believe Black patients have greater resistance to pain, and that students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) pay more for student loans, a situation she called “educational redlining.” Black COVID-19 patients are also dying at higher rates, which some have attributed to pre-existing conditions. “What if I told you that racism is a preexisting condition, and your country makes you the most vulnerable?” Love countered, citing that Black Americans have had their access to well-paying jobs, education, housing and other aspects of what she called the “social safety net” severely limited.
“When there’s a global pandemic and you need all of those institutions to work … if you are not allowed all of those things, you are not allowed a social safety net,” she said. Love also recapped Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight to redistribute wealth and political power in his multiethnic Poor People’s Campaign. “What we have done is not only try to free ourselves but try to free everybody else as well,” she said.
Repeated exposure to incidents of vicious racism being visited on Black people can be very traumatic. “We are living in a world where every solution is punishment,” she said. “We are murdering children’s spirits.”
Love also emphasized the importance of realizing that “Black folks’ lives are more than just trauma, more than just oppression,” and to recognize “how we try, how we get knocked down, how we get back up, with swag.”
Black Americans have learned to adapt and innovate largely because “we’ve studied this place so well. [As a Black person], you know you can’t go through the front door and you can’t go through the back door. You have to know every angle.”
To reinforce her point, she quoted poet Nikki Giovanni, who said, “Style has a profound meaning to Black Americans. If we can’t drive, we will invent walks and the world will envy the dexterity of our feet … if given scraps, we will make quilts … take away our drums, and we will clap our hands. We prove the human spirit will prevail.”
In order to create a just society, Love proposed that a radical transformation is necessary and not just a reforming of the current system. Her concept of abolition involves first instilling “an imagination to create a world without oppression. It is a radical framework that asks us to look deeply at our institutions, and not try to reform them, but to build something new,” she said. “We are trying to go to the very root of oppressions. We have to look at the very structures that create prisons, the very idea of jobs and education.”
Love ended her talk by communicating the importance of being a co-conspirator instead of an ally, by calling out forms of oppression and actively working to avoid creating systems of injustice, imploring people to “live your everyday life trying to make this world better.”
The regional winners of the 2021 Bay Area Scholastic Art & Writing Awards were announced last week, and Harker students pulled in 189 awards (73 in art and 116 in writing). Sophomore Sarah Mohammed’s poem, “Homeland, Gone,” was selected as one of five nominees for the Bay Area Writing Region’s National American Voices Medal, the winner of which will be announced in March, along with all of this year’s national award winners.
Harker won a total of 42 Gold Keys, 54 Silver Keys and 93 Honorable Mentions. Gold Key winners are eligible to win national awards, and all national award winners will be honored at a ceremony in June.
The complete list of Harker winners is as follows:
Art:
Name
Grade
Category
Award
Anoushka Buch
12
Design
Silver Key
Anoushka Buch
12
Design
Honorable Mention
Shareen Chahal
12
Photography
Gold Key
Dawson Chen
9
Drawing & Illustration
Honorable Mention
Karina Chen
11
Film & Animation
Silver Key
Karina Chen
10
Comic Art
Gold Key
Alice Feng
10
Digital Art
Honorable Mention
Alice Feng
11
Photography
Honorable Mention
Alice Feng
11
Photography
Silver Key
Alice Feng
11
Photography
Honorable Mention
Alice Feng
11
Photography
Gold Key
Alice Feng
11
Photography
Honorable Mention
Alice Feng
11
Photography
Honorable Mention
Alice Feng
11
Photography
Honorable Mention
Alice Feng
11
Sculpture
Gold Key
Alice Feng
11
Fashion
Silver Key
Mirabelle Feng
11
Fashion
Silver Key
Mirabelle Feng
8
Photography
Silver Key
Sonya He
8
Painting
Honorable Mention
Reagan Ka
10
Painting
Honorable Mention
Reagan Ka
11
Expanded Projects
Honorable Mention
Reagan Ka
11
Sculpture
Honorable Mention
Reagan Ka
11
Design
Honorable Mention
Ally Lee
11
Design
Honorable Mention
Michelle Liu
10
Digital Art
Silver Key
Michelle Liu
11
Digital Art
Honorable Mention
Michelle Liu
11
Design
Honorable Mention
Aastha Mangla
11
Expanded Projects
Silver Key
Sarah Fathima Mohammed
10
Painting
Honorable Mention
Muthiah Panchanatham
10
Digital Art
Silver Key
Julie Shi
9
Digital Art
Silver Key
Claire Su
9
Digital Art
Silver Key
Alysa Suleiman
9
Painting
Honorable Mention
Alysa Suleiman
11
Photography
Honorable Mention
Alysa Suleiman
11
Photography
Honorable Mention
Alysa Suleiman
11
Photography
Honorable Mention
Emily Tan
11
Photography
Silver Key
Emily Tan
11
“Editorial Cartoon sponsored by The Herb Block Foundation”
Honorable Mention
Nicole Tian
11
“Editorial Cartoon sponsored by The Herb Block Foundation”
Ron McCurdy, a professor of music at the University of Southern California, gave a presentation Tuesday on the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. His appearance was the first in a series of four planned for the upper school’s spring semester. McCurdy, who previously served as a professor of music and chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota, is also the creator of the Langston Hughes Project, a live multimedia performance of Langston Hughes’ “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz,” which will be performed during McCurdy’s fourth appearance in April.
The presentation began with a brief history of the arrival of the first Africans on the American continent in the 17th century, their enslavement by European settlers (at the persuasion of rich European landowners), the Emancipation Proclamation (which McCurdy said was an act of “economic and political expediency”) and the 13th Amendment, which formally abolished slavery but contained a massive loophole: that people guilty of criminal behavior could be placed back into bondage.
“So we know that with the 13th Amendment being enacted, that almost any aspect of African-American life was somehow criminalized,” McCurdy said. One of the most flagrant abuses of the loophole involved the crime of vagrancy, in which a person was unable to produce papers proving they were employed. This criminalization of Black life, McCurdy said, continues today. “It is no accident … that even though African-Americans make up less than 30 percent of the population, we represent more than 50 percent of the population in prison,” he noted.
During the migration of Black Americans from the South to the North and Midwest, “an amalgamation of doctors, lawyers, teachers, dentists, gangsters … you name it,” arrived in Harlem, McCurdy said. This also included a great number of artists and intellectuals, resulting in what has become known as the Harlem Renaissance. “The Harlem Renaissance was probably one of the first times in our country where white America began to take notice of African-American culture,” said McCurdy. Before then, Black Americans were judged only by the amount of labor they performed.
Artists from many disciplines – including music, poetry, painting and literature – created works that chronicled Black life in the 1920s. McCurdy covered several of the key figures during this period, including Hughes, whose work delved into the contradiction of the idea of America as “land of the free.”
Harlem also had its own successful baseball and basketball teams. The New York Renaissance basketball team (often shortened to Rens), was based in Harlem and would play exhibition games against the Boston Celtics, who they frequently defeated. The Rens were paid in checks, which would often bounce. The two teams befriended one another, and the Celtics later demanded that the Rens be paid in cash.
Black musicians in the 1920s, many trained at top American musical schools, had difficulty finding opportunities in America and frequently performed in Europe. These included singer Marian Anderson, who toured successfully in Europe before returning to America. After being denied the opportunity to sing at Washington D.C.’s Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, she gave a now-famous concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Singer and actor Paul Robeson also became popular for his theater performances, particularly of the song “Ol’ Man River,” which he repurposed later in his life as an anthem against oppression. In the 1940s he was blacklisted for his sympathies for the Soviet Union and stances against American imperialism and could no longer travel abroad to perform.
The Cotton Club began operation in Harlem in 1923, employing Black entertainers whose performances at the whites-only venue helped launch their careers. Due to the popularity of minstrelsy and later vaudeville in the early 20th century, African-American performers “were expected to comport themselves in a very subservient way.” McCurdy recalled a conversation he had with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who held little respect for Louis Armstrong as a boy “until he understood the history. And that way of comporting yourself was a defense mechanism. It was a survival technique,” McCurdy said. “Because if you came across as an African-American man with any degree of arrogance or too much confidence, that could get you killed.”
The growing popularity of jazz brought with it new dances such as the Lindy Hop and the Big Apple. As an art, dance began “moving away from the Victorian style of living, where everything was pristine and carefully done,” McCurdy said. “Now many of the Black dances … these were all dances that found their genesis in the Black community.” This style became popular with white youths, who were “having themselves a ball, much to the chagrin of their parents,” McCurdy remarked.
McCurdy’s next appearance will take place in late February, in which he will examine jazz performance practices and how they are similar to leadership, using examples by Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Benny Goodman.
Jazz pianist Taylor Eigsti appeared via Zoom Friday night for the third event of the 2021 Virtual Harker Concert Series. Speaking with longtime friend Dave Hart, Harker’s upper school instrumental music chair and artistic director of the Harker concert series, Eigsti got attendees caught up on his recent activities, showing off the setup he had put together for online lessons. “I spent my entire life not doing online lessons,” he said. “It was something that I was pretty staunch about.”
With in-person lessons now infeasible due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Eigsti spent considerable time preparing for online lessons, and expressed amusement at his newfound obsession with cameras and live sound. During one of the very few live gigs he played in the past year, he found himself chatting with the sound crew. “I’m picking the brains of the sound engineers,” he said. “It really is a deep dive into all of the other things since we have to do all of this stuff ourselves now.”
Discussing life as a member pf legendary trumpeter Chris Botti’s band, Eigsti stressed the importance of making time for oneself. “If you’re doing 270 gigs a year in one band, it’s hard to do anything else. You’ve got to balance it out with some white space,” he said.
As a bandleader himself, Eigsti learned a great deal from how Botti led his ensembles. “He just has a real structure to the show. It’s like a well-oiled machine,” he said, drawing a distinction between Botti and the way he had been accustomed to performing different music every night.
Eigsti’s next album, titled “Tree Falls,” is scheduled for release on May 21 through GSI Records. The first single, a cover of Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer’s “Skylark,” features former “American Idol” contestant Casey Abrams. “This is the project I’m the most proud of in my whole life,” Eigsti said. “I haven’t released an album in 11 years, so it’s wild to release an album now.”
His other major project is a collaboration with the Community School of Music and Arts called “Imagine Our Future,” in which he has been commissioned to write a piece based on ideas sent to him by Bay Area students. “When I’m composing I really like to take a lot of ideas that could really come from anywhere,” he said. “This is definitely a little bit more of a challenge than I thought it would be. It’s really interesting to see how it’s naturally coming together.”
Answering a question about compositions played by his band, Eigsti noted “it’s different every time. Sometimes we’ll do a show and everyone in the band might have some tune that’s written by them.
“I tend to like to play the music of my friends and also my own music and different songs that people know that could be covers or jazz standards,” he added.
On the process of composing, Eigsti said he believes “only 10 percent of what we write is actually good, so you might as well just keep writing.” He also encouraged exploring many sources for inspiration and experimenting with ideas. “Try things out in different keys,” he said. “Sometimes we think of ideas where their home is somewhere else.”
Yesterday, 12 Harker seniors were selected as candidates for the 2021 U.S. Presidential Scholars program. Each year the U.S. Department of Education selects Presidential Scholar candidates among students who have demonstrated excellence in academics, the arts, and career and technical education fields. Candidates may submit additional materials, including essays, transcripts and self-assessments, to advance in the program. Approximately 500 candidates will be selected as semifinalists in March. In April, 121 students will be named Presidential Scholars.
This year’s candidates are: Andrew Lu, Clair Luo, John Lynch, Arya Maheshwari, Akshay Manglik, Utkarsh Priyam, Aditya Singhvi, Srinath Somasundaram, Nicholas Yi, Alex Zhai, Elaine Zhai and Weixuan Zhang.
Simar Bajaj ‘20, now in his first year at Harvard, was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals. His piece, co-authored with Fatima Stanford, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, examines the relationship between systemic racism and the reluctance in Black communities to accept COVID-19 vaccines. Reasons cited include the persistence of wrong diagnoses and denial of necessary treatment for Black Americans. The article also proposes that Black health experts be the directors of messaging to Black communities to increase trust of the vaccine.
The competition, held by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, tasks teams with planning a client’s investment goals. Each team has an approved list of stocks they can use over a period of 10 weeks to build their portfolios.
Next, the team will create a video presentation and complete the written portion of the competition for the regional finals in March.