Late last month, middle school math teacher and department chair Vandana Kadam received the Edyth May Sliffe Award for Distinguished Teaching in Middle School and High School. The Mathematical Association of America presents this award to teachers who foster student interest in mathematics by competing in the yearly American Mathematics Competitions.
Candidates are nominated based on recommendation letters from colleagues, and selected for the award based on criteria such as improving AMC scores, increased student participation and increased numbers of students invited to participate in the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) and the USA Mathematics Olympiad (USAMO). Congrats to Ms. Kadam on this well-earned recognition!
The football team picked up a 22-18 win over James Lick last Friday. Marcus Tymous, grade 12, and Anthony Meissner, grade 12, each rushed for a score, and Meissner connected with Jared Anderson, grade 12, for a 73-yard touchdown. Anderson also added a 23-yard field goal. On the defensive side of the ball, Giovanni Rofa, grade 11, and Mitchell Granados, grade 12, each intercepted a pass. This week, the Eagles take on Washington High in San Francisco on Friday.
Boys Water Polo
The boys water polo team opened its 2018 season with an 18-5 win over Lynbrook at the Wilcox Tournament on Friday, but fell to Wilcox 16-12 and Monta Vista 18-17 on Saturday to take fourth place. Next up for the Eagles is a home match with Saratoga on Sept. 4 at 6:15 p.m.
Volleyball
The varsity girls volleyball team opens its season on Aug. 28 at Branham High School. The team’s first home action of the 2018 season will be on Aug. 30 at 6:30 p.m. when the Eagles host Mountain View.
Girls Golf
The girls golf team kicks off its season on Aug. 28 in a tri-match with Palo Alto High and Valley Christian.
Girls Tennis
The girls tennis team opens its season in early September at the California Tennis Classic in Fresno.
Cross Country
Cross Country will make its 2018 debut at the Gunn High Meet on Aug. 30.
Girls Water Polo
The girls water polo teams begin the season on Sept. 4 against Saratoga at the Singh Aquatic Center at 4:45 p.m.
The Harker Conservatory held its inaugural Summer Conservatory program in June and July, inviting young theater enthusiasts to grasp a unique opportunity to hone their craft and learn from top instructors and industry professionals.
Laura Lang-Ree, Harker’s director of performing arts, had been exploring the idea of a summer program at Harker, as she knew firsthand the value of strong summer performing arts programs, both as a professional and a mother to three performing arts-loving kids.
“But I also knew that there was nowhere to host it. … With nowhere to host such a program, it was only a dream – until this year,” said Lang-Ree, alluding to the opening of the Rothschild Performing Arts Center. As the opening of the new building approached, she began looking into how to develop a summer program while addressing another challenge: how to create a program that would not directly compete with other summer performing arts offerings outside Harker that she felt were “already doing a wonderful job.”
“There was a lot around that was really great, and there is no reason to compete with programs that are already doing a great service in the community,” she said. To this end, Lang-Ree began searching last summer for a specific niche that the future program would fill to enhance the selection of summer offerings without competing with them.
It was around this time that Lang-Ree discovered that one of her favorite theater companies, the California Theatre Center, would be closing its doors after more than 40 years. Lang-Ree, who found the news “devastating,” stepped up to help fill the void left by CTC’s closure. Her own children – rising senior Ellie, Cecilia ’13 and Madi ’15, who was on staff at Summer Conservatory – had enjoyed great experiences at programs such as CTC and Peninsula Youth Theatre. “Our summers were full of fantastic theater opportunities,” she said. “Losing CTC was a loss to the entire community.”
With the information she had gathered from consulting people from other summer programs, Lang-Ree designed the Summer Conservatory to be “a process-based, in-depth, thoughtful program for kids who are really hungry to learn more, do more and be more as a theater artist student.”
Students in grades 6-9 joined the Conservatory Presents course, designed for young theater lovers eager to build their chops. A more advanced course, called Conservatory Intensive, was available for grade 9-12 students by audition only. Morning classes – both required and elective – emphasized voice and movement, scene study, improvisation and other techniques.
“One of the interesting things about being a performer is you go deeper as you repeat lessons already learned,” Lang-Ree explained. “There’s a certain level of repetition that’s very important to becoming a more finessed performer, and yet we’ll always have something a little bit more to hand the older child so that they’re getting more to chew on as they grow.”
Students spent the afternoons rehearsing for one-act plays that were performed on the final day of the program. Performers were cast following auditions held at the beginning of the course.
Among the directing staff, 2015 Harker Conservatory graduates Zoe Woehrmann and Madi Lang-Ree were brought on as co-directors for the showcase, and helped develop and teach acting classes in addition to their directorial duties.
“We’ve been a part of the performing arts program at Harker for our entire lives, and it’s what inspired us to pursue theater in college as well,” Woehrmann said. “When we heard of the opportunity to be able to help be part of the inaugural group of teachers and directors to start the summer program at Harker … we just jumped at the opportunity.”
Because of their extensive conservatory experience (both were directors featured in the 2015 Student Directed Showcase), she and Madi were given considerable freedom when helping to create the Summer Conservatory curriculum along with Lang-Ree. Both alumnae also are studying theater in college, with Madi having directed a one-act play in her most recent semester at Chapman University, and Woehrmann, a rising senior at New York University, planning to take a play she wrote and directed to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
“We worked together before camp actually started to design the curriculum and the daily schedule of classes we thought were important and how we were going to structure them and what we were going to teach within them,” Woerhmann said. They then worked in conjunction with Lang-Ree to come up with the best possible age-appropriate class curriculum for serious theater students.
Madi, who has previous experience teaching at other summer programs, said she was surprised by how much students already knew and their enthusiasm for the many aspects of the program. “I don’t remember knowing very much at all about Shakespeare in middle school, but I’ve had a couple kids who are like, ‘I’ve got this monologue memorized from Hamlet and this one from Macbeth!’” she exclaimed. “And then some kids will really like movement or really like improvisation and some kids will keep asking us, ‘Can I help with costumes or can I help with tech elements as well as being on stage.’”
Students with that eagerness to delve deeply into theater are precisely the type Laura Lang-Ree hopes the program will continue to attract. “[Summer Conservatory] is for the kid who believes what’s fun is the day-to-day work, the rehearsals where they can go deeper and bring out all the details of their characters and the story they are telling” she said. “That’s what they will achieve here.”
In the late 1880s, the town of Palo Alto had only about 1,400 residents. It would be nearly another 100 years before the term “Silicon Valley” was coined and the area became known as an innovation hub. In 1890, Congress had just established Yosemite as the nation’s third national park and Stanford University was in its infancy.
However, the need for students who were well prepared to go on to Stanford and other top universities was evident. So, in 1893 at the behest of Stanford’s first president, The Harker School was founded by Frank Cramer as Manzanita Hall, a college preparatory school for boys. Miss Harker’s School for Girls, founded by Catherine Harker, followed soon after in 1902.
The boys volleyball season came to an end over the weekend as the team came up short at the NorCal finals. The week started with a 3-0 win over St. Patrick/St. Vincent of Vallejo, followed by a spirited 3-2 win over CCS champs Carmel. However, the Eagles lost to Amador Valley in five games in the finals. Still, the year was a huge success as the Eagles made the CCS finals and NorCal finals for the first time in Harker history. Congrats on a great year!
Lacrosse
A big congrats to Elise Mayer, grade 11, for her NorCal team’s division championship competing at the US Nationals Lacrosse tournament in Stony Brook, N.Y. Elise scored twice in the championship game as the team of elite NorCal players competed against 60 other regional teams from throughout the country.
All-League Honors
It was one of the best spring seasons in Harker history and it showed, as many Eagle student athletes were honored with All-League recognition.
Lacrosse: Nellie Tonev, grade 10, was named goalkeeper of the year; first team honors went to Elise Mayer, grade 11, Lauren Russell, grade 12, Heidi Zhang, grade 11, and Tonev; Lisa Barooah, grade 9, and Grace Hajjar, grade 10, were named to the second team; and Sara Yen, grade 9, was an honorable mention.
Swimming: Vivian Wang, grade 12, and Ethan Hu, grade 10, were the girls and boys league MVPs; Jason Kwok, grade 9, Matthew Chung, grade 9, and Yannick Bohbot-Dridi, grade 12, were named to the first team; and Rhys Edwards, grade 9, was named to the second team.
Boys Volleyball: Jarrett Anderson, grade 11, was named the co-junior of the year, with Billy Fan, grade 9, named the freshman of the year; Anderson and Fan were also each named to the first team; and Charlie Molin, grade 11, and Jeffrey Kwan, grade 10, were named to the second team.
Boys Golf: Daulet Tuleubayev, grade 12, was the league co-MVP; Jaimin Bhagat, grade 10, and Jin Kim, grade 12, were named to the first team; and Bradley Lu, grade 9, and Victor Shin, grade 12, earned second team honors.
Softball: Kristin LeBlanc, grade 12, was named to the first team; Anika Rajamani, grade 11, and Taylor Lam, grade 11, both earned second team honors; and Cameron Zell, grade 11, was an honorable mention.
Baseball: Dominic Cea, grade 12, earned first team catcher honors, with Matthew Kennedy, grade 12, and Max Lee, grade 10, named to the first team outfield; Nicholas Coulter, grade 9, was a second team Infielder; and Luke Wancewicz, grade 9, earned an honorable mention.
Track and Field: Ayush Vyas, grade 11, was a first team recipient; honorable mentions went to Anna Weirich, grade 9, Grace Koonmen, grade 12, Anthony Contreras, grade 12, Mitchell Granados, grade 11, Marcus Tymous, grade 11, Angel Cervantes, grade 12, and Ryan Adolf, grade 11.
Boys Tennis: David Wen, grade 12, Mihir Sharma, grade 10, and Richard Hu, grade 10, were named to the first team; Randy Zhao, grade 12, and Neil Bai, grade 12, earned second team honors; and Ramanand Vegesna, grade 10, was an honorable mention.
Harker Preschool’s Clover Cottage celebrated the completion of its yearlong Zoo-phonics program with a special “zoo week.” Each child brought in a stuffed animal from home, corresponding with animals from the program, which was then used in a variety of educational activities throughout the week.
Activities included sorting animals, counting the number of similar animals, creating descriptive sentences about the animals and matching the various animals to the appropriate letters. The Clovers ended the week with a zoo party; they dressed up in animal clothing, had zoo-themed snacks, played parachute games with the zoo friends and much more. The children had an “animaltastic” time!
The 2018 senior class officially became graduates on May 24 at this year’s graduation ceremony. Despite unseasonably cold and windy weather, attendees flocked to the Mountain Winery in Saratoga to see the Class of 2018 take this pivotal step in their young lives.
Accompanied by the Harker Chamber Orchestra’s performance of “Pomp and Circumstance,” the seniors made their way to their seats, cheered on by their families and friends. Andrew Semenza’s evocative valedictorian address – which referenced everything from experimental neurosurgery to structuralist literature to Russian master pianist Sviatoslav Richter – was a paean to imperfection, in which he opined, “When we think of irregularity as dirty, we endanger everything.”
Keynote speaker Tanya Schmidt ’08, the first upper school graduate to give a keynote speech at graduation, advised the graduates not to be afraid of unexpected changes. “Have the courage to be curious, and make space to listen to yourself,” she said.
Giving his first graduation address as head of school, Brian Yager imparted upon the graduates his hope that they would work to better the world “not because of the compensation for doing so, but in spite of it” as well as “continually experience and contribute to the power of love.” After receiving their diplomas (to wild cheers from friends and family), the students moved their tassels leftward and flung their caps into the air. Congratulations!
Harker middle school speech and debate team members competed at three tournaments in three states – California, Georgia and Texas – in April and early May.
In April, at the National Debate Coaches Association National Championship in Atlanta, 166 entries from 102 schools across 26 states competed. Harker had two middle school entrants and a few upper school entrants.
Also in April, 10 middle and upper school Harker students competed at the St. Marks Novice Round Up in Dallas. A dozen schools were represented. Results are below.
Novice Policy
1st – Deven Shah and Andy Lee, grades 8 and 9, respectively, went undefeated with a perfect 19-0 ballot count.
Novice Policy Speaker Awards
1st – Andy Lee
2nd – Deven Shah
6th – Ansh Sheth, grade 6
On May 7, approximately 40 Harker middle schools students competed against each other in two distinct intramural debate events in preparation for the Middle School Tournament of Champions Nationals, and earned the following awards:
Lincoln-Douglas
1st – Rahul Santhanam, grade 7
2nd – Brian Chen, grade 7
Public Forum
1st – Sriram Bhimaraju and Arjun Gurjar, both grade 6 (3-0)
2nd – Adam Sayed and Sathvik Chundru, both grade 6 (3-0)
Public Forum Speaker Awards
1st – Sascha Pakravan, grade 8
2nd – Carol Wininger, grade 7
3rd – Ansh Sheth, grade 6
4th – Ayan Nath, grade 8
5th – Deeya Viradia, grade 7
In early May, Harker speech and debate team members attended the middle school TOC at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington.
At the event, 232 of the best middle school speech and debate students from 35 schools competed. Overall, Harker had great success across all events. Harker won the First Place Sweepstakes Team Award for best middle school speech and debate team in the country.
Harker students won the following awards, competing against some of the best middle school teams in the country:
Policy
1st – Deven Shah and Mir Bahri, grade 7, undefeated, 20-0 ballot count
5th – Saanvi Arora, grade 8, and Sarah Mohammed, grade 7
Policy Speaker Awards
2nd – Deven Shah
18th – Mir Bahri
Lincoln-Douglas
2nd – Anshul Reddy, grade 8
3rd – Alexander Lan, grade 7
5th – Akhilesh Chegu, grade 8
5th – Arnav Dani, grade 8
9th – Brian Chen, grade 7
Lincoln-Douglas Speaker Awards
1st – Akhilesh Chegu, grade 8
3rd – Krish Maniar, grade 7
4th – Anshul Reddy, grade 8
Public Forum
1st – Sascha Pakravan and Ayan Nath
2nd – Krishna Mysoor, grade 7, and Ansh Sheth
5th – Arnav Jain and Rohan Rashingkar, both grade 8
17th – Michelle Jin and Lexi Nishimura, both grade 7
A huge congratulations to the five Harker swimmers who competed at the state championships this weekend. Ethan Hu, grade 10, brought home Harker’s first-ever state championship, in any sport, as he won the 100 butterfly. Hu also placed fourth in the 200 IM (and was mentioned in an article in The Mercury News); Matthew Chung, grade 9, took 20th in the 500 free; Jason Kwok, grade 9, was 33rd in the 100 breast; the 400 free relay team of Chung, Hu, Rhys Edwards, grade 9, and Yannick Bohbot-Dridi, grade 12, took 21st; and the 200 medley relay team of Chung, Kwok, Hu and Edwards was 22nd.
Boys Tennis
David Wen, grade 12, won his first CCS match last week 2-6, 6-3, 6-3 before falling to the No. 1 seed in the second round. The duo of Neil Bai and Randy Zhao, both grade 12, also won their first round match, 6-2, 3-6, 6-3, before falling to the No. 1 doubles team in the second round as well.
Boys Volleyball
The boys volleyball season continues this Tuesday night as the Eagles are ranked No. 3 in the CIF D2 Boys Volleyball Championship and will host St. Patrick-St. Vincent of Vallejo.
Boys Golf
The boys golf team finished its season in fifth place last week at the CCS Championships. Daulet Tuleubayev, grade 12, was the top individual Eagle finishing tied for seventh in CCS.
Track and Field
The lone Harker representative at the CCS preliminaries, Ayush Vyas, grade 11, finished 30th in CCS in the discus this weekend.
Spring Scholastic Championship Teams
Many Harker spring teams were named 2018 Scholastic Championship teams by having a top five GPA in their respective sports in CCS. Baseball (3.8780), boys volleyball (3.7400) and boys golf (3.8780) were tops in their sports; girls lacrosse (3.7250) and boys track and field (3.6950) finished second in their sports; softball (3.7250) and girls swimming (3.7560) each finished fourth; and boys swimming (3.6150) and boys tennis (3.6660) finished fifth. Congrats to our awesome student athletes.
The grandparents and “grandfriends” of lower school students arrived in the hundreds today for the annual Lower School Grandparents’ Day. Visitors received a warm welcome from primary division head Sarah Leonard and elementary division head Kristin Giammona before being treated to performances by singers from grades 1 and 4, and the grades 4-6 Dance Fusion group. After some more words from Head of School Brian Yager, the guests met up with their grandchildren to tour the campus for an activity-packed afternoon, which included viewing student artwork at the Art Show, seeing a robotics demonstration, a book fair and a dazzling magic show!