Yesterday’s LID Vision Day offered Harker teachers the opportunity to attend a variety workshops led by Harker middle school teachers, some of whom participated in the 2017 LID Grant program. A total of six sessions, held concurrently in various rooms around the middle school campus, gave teachers insight into how their colleagues used the program to bolster their teaching methods.
History teacher Sara Pawloski, English teacher Mark Gelineau and Spanish teacher Julie Pinzas demonstrated Google Expeditions VR by taking teachers on a virtual trip to New York’s Citi Field using special headsets. Science teacher Kathy Peng recapped the fidget spinner projects she had her students conduct using 3-D printers, which provided valuable lessons on how to design group projects that integrate self and peer assessment, project reflection and other useful concepts.
In history teacher Melanie Ramsey’s classroom, teachers learned how visual notetaking could help students better retain and understand the material they learn, in addition to improving their creative thinking. Math teacher Andy Gersh showed teachers how the use of games such as Minecraft could encourage reflection on classroom lessons.
Teachers attending math teacher Hava Sasson’s workshop learned the various uses of Desmos, an web-based graphing calculator that also serves as a collaboration tool, and how teachers can use it to creative unique lessons and assignments. History teacher Keith Hirota demonstrated how to create interactive lessons using software called Apollo, whose simple drag-and-drop functionality makes adding files easy. Students can also collaborate on these files using their own devices as well as access them from home.
After a Harker career spanning 40 years, Cindy Ellis, middle school division head, announced that she will retire at the end of the 2017-18 school year.
Ellis’ time at Harker included working as a houseparent for the school’s boarding program (which closed in 2002), teaching algebra and pre-algebra at the middle school, and serving as chair to the K-8 math department. She also developed Harker’s math lab program and wrote curricula for elementary grades for educational publishers. In 2000, her extensive work earned her the Edyth May Sliffe Award for Distinguished Mathematics Teaching in Middle School, a national honor.
Since 2004, Ellis has been the middle school’s division head, a position she has filled with dedication, vision and kindness. An immensely grateful Harker community looks forward to sharing Ellis’ final year with her, and wishes her all the best in her retirement.
After a Harker career spanning 40 years, Cindy Ellis, middle school division head, announced that she will retire at the end of the 2017-18 school year.
Ellis’ time at Harker included working as a houseparent for the school’s boarding program (which closed in 2002), teaching algebra and pre-algebra at the middle school, and serving as chair to the K-8 math department. She also developed Harker’s math lab program and wrote curricula for elementary grades for educational publishers. In 2000, her extensive work earned her the Edyth May Sliffe Award for Distinguished Mathematics Teaching in Middle School, a national honor.
Since 2004, Ellis has been the middle school’s division head, a position she has filled with dedication, vision and kindness. An immensely grateful Harker community looks forward to sharing Ellis’ final year with her, and wishes her all the best in her retirement.
After a Harker career spanning 40 years, Cindy Ellis, middle school division head, announced that she will retire at the end of the 2017-18 school year.
Ellis’ time at Harker included working as a houseparent for the school’s boarding program (which closed in 2002), teaching algebra and pre-algebra at the middle school, and serving as chair to the K-8 math department. She also developed Harker’s math lab program and wrote curricula for elementary grades for educational publishers. In 2000, her extensive work earned her the Edyth May Sliffe Award for Distinguished Mathematics Teaching in Middle School, a national honor.
Since 2004, Ellis has been the middle school’s division head, a position she has filled with dedication, vision and kindness. An immensely grateful Harker community looks forward to sharing Ellis’ final year with her, and wishes her all the best in her retirement.
Upper school science teacher Kate Schafer recently began a two-week survey in the Gulf of Mexico, where she and other scientists are “studying shark and red snapper populations in locations around the gulf,” she said. Schafer is aboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) ship Oregon II as part of NOAA’s Teacher at Sea program. Throughout the survey, she will be posting updates and photos at a blog set up for her by the program.
Founded in 1970, NOAA incorporates the work of 6,773 scientists to monitor and understand the planet’s changing climate conditions and share their findings. This year, NOAA received nearly 250 applications for the Teacher at Sea program, and 30 were selected to participate.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2017 issue of Harker Magazine.
Pat Walsh is a legend at Harker. The lower school math teacher has been at Harker since 1976, first as a summer camp coach, then dorm houseparent, and is retiring this year. He’s done it all, including driving a bus, coaching sports and organizing Harker’s Thanksgiving food drive for most of his career here. Students who went through his classroom remember him forever, and it’s clear from his interview that the passion he has for teaching, for his family, for volunteer work (and, oh yes, his obsession for the San Francisco Giants) is why his students love him so dearly. Walsh’s wife, Terry, whom he calls “the rock of our family,” worked at Harker for 35 years, and their three sons, Matt, Danny and Kevin, all attended Harker through grade 8.
What is something one of your parents said that you will never forget?
My mother was a teacher, and she told me a teacher’s No. 1 job is to be an advocate for all of their students. And in order to be an advocate, one has to focus on a kid’s good qualities … and every kid has plenty of good qualities.
What was one of your funniest classroom moments?
It’s embarrassing. Years ago while teaching third grade, I let my room mom, Melody Moyer, talk me into wearing a cupid outfit for the Halloween party. The kids were absolutely howling when they saw me. Now on Valentine’s Day, we play “Pin the Diaper on the Cupid.” It gets pretty silly, and they love it.
What is the one thing in the world you would fix if you could wave a magic wand?
Childhood poverty and lack of opportunity. It breaks my heart. This is something I emphasize with
my kids, too. I believe that those of us who have been blessed with abundance have a duty to
give back to those who are less fortunate.
Where in the world are you the happiest?
Family gatherings. I love to lay low and watch my sons talking with my friends and their other relatives. I learn a lot about them just by watching. All three of them are good men and interesting people.
What’s one of the favorite things you do in the classroom?
One of the things all of my students comment on when I see them years later is the “letter.” Each year I have taught, I have my kids write a letter to themselves. The first part of the letter is a summary of their year in grade 5. For the second part of the letter, I ask them to look into the future and predict how they think their lives will change over the course of the next three years. I mail these out the week they are wrapping up eighth grade.
This article first appeared in the summer 2017 issue of Harker Magazine.
The words, scrawled neatly in reddish-brown, rest solemnly on a rectangular piece of construction paper: “How dreadful is the dawn.” “I walk burdened and irritated,” reads the line on the next piece. Two additional pieces complete the grim stanza: “My heart beats as though with hammers/Everything around me begins to weep.”
They are not the words of students in a creative writing course, but the echoes of long silenced voices, pieced together from the discovered writings of Holocaust victims. Many of the sources were not old enough to attend high school at the time they composed these writings.
It’s an example of a “found poetry” exercise conducted by upper school teacher Roxana Pianko’s world history students. The exercise is based on one she participated in during a weeklong conference held by Facing History and Ourselves, a nonprofit educational organization based in Los Angeles.
Pianko attended the conference as part of her work in the Raju and Bala Vegesna Foundation’s Teacher Excellence Program, a grant program that funds professional development opportunities for Harker teachers.
“[The Vegesnas] so value the importance of a good teacher,” said JenniferGargano, assistant head of school for academic affairs. “They know the difference a good teacher can make.”
Raju Vegesna said the program was started largely due to the continuously evolving nature of education and the increasing integration of technology into teaching methods. “In my mind, education is a continuous thing,” he said. “Technology is evolving and the tools are changing. The ways and methods of teaching have to be different.”
Pianko was among the first round of Harker teachers to be selected for the grants in 2015. “I knew coming into this community that I wanted to figure out a way to bring in the things that I was very passionate about, and I was already getting to kind of scratch the surface with the Holocaust and genocide just because I teach World History 2,” Pianko said. “I had this hope that at some point it would eventually be a little bit more than just two days in my classes.”
In addition to the LA conference, the grant also enabled Pianko to travel to Europe to expand her expertise, visiting the sites of several concentration camps, as well as museums and institutions located in Germany, Poland and the Netherlands. The many people she met at various institutions were very accommodating, she recalled: “They were just throwing resources at me. They were giving me things that were not yet published, but that they wanted to share with me to build my understanding of the work that was being done.”
Pianko’s research fed into other areas of teaching as well. In her World History 2 Honors class, students are given assignments that combine biographical writing and research with visual media. They are tasked with selecting a figure from the Holocaust based on their role (survivor, victim, resister or collaborator) and writing a profile of the person, as well as creating a photo collage spanning the person’s life. One of Pianko’s hopes is that students will absorb the lessons of the Holocaust and develop a keener sense of the warning signs that led up to it.
“There is a social justice component to it, and I want them to have these experiences inside my classroom, to get to learn about genocide, to get to learn about the Holocaust,” she said. “I wanted to do [this project] because I wanted to gain the necessary knowledge in order to create something that could potentially be transformative.”
Her research also led to the formation of an elective class focused on the Holocaust and other examples of genocide throughout history, which is set to start in the fall. The class will culminate in a collaborative project to be presented as a historical lesson to the greater Harker community. “These 17-year-old kids are no longer seeing themselves as voiceless or powerless or incapable of changing things,” Pianko said.
Elsewhere in Europe that same summer, upper school music teacher Susan Nace was honing her skills as a conductor. Nace traveled to Oxford, England, to study at the Choral Conducting Institute at St. Stephen’s College, under the direction of Grammy-nominated conductor James Jordan and James Whitbourn, formerly of the BBC and co-director of the Choral Institute at Oxford.
The intensive course consisted of master classes, lectures and private tutoring intended to help conductors master their craft. In the process, Nace was introduced to the work of Rudolf von Laban, a German dance artist notable for the dance notation system he published in 1928. This notation developed further over time, and incorporated what are known as “efforts,” or actions that change the dynamics of movement. Words such as “glide,” “slash,” “punch” and “dab” (not to be confused with the popular dance move) “are descriptions of a movement that is in dance, and it has to do with the time, the space and the weight,” said Nace. “So, for example, dab is a very specific time, it has a light weight, and the space is very small,” she explained. “Something like a glide has an indeterminate time, and it’s sort of an indeterminate space too, and it has a little more weight.”
Using efforts based on the Laban method has opened up a range of conducting techniques that allow Nace and her students to interpret and perform music in unique and interesting ways. “When I’m talking to my students and we’re working on a choral piece, I will say, ‘OK, what kind of gesture does this need?’ and they’ll say, ‘This feels like a dab to me, we’re just tapping. This one feels like we need to punch it, it needs some more weight.’”
Talking through interpretations in this way also opens up more possibilities for analyzing the music itself, as it may provide clues to the kinds of efforts that may enhance the performance of the material. “Notation is not the music. It’s only a representation of what music can be, but it’s not the actual music. And there are so many things that cannot be placed into a score,” Nace said.
Laban efforts, she added, are another way to “take what is represented on that page to make it come alive.” It has also provided another way for Nace to connect with her students, which she considers crucial. “The more you incorporate students’ input, the more you ask them to draw out of themselves, I think then you have more buy-in in what goes on in performing a piece.”
Back in California, Scott Kley Contini , middle school learning, innovation and design director, initially planned to use his grant to attend a design thinking workshop held by Stanford University’s d.school. Unfortunately, the course was in such high demand that Kley Contini likely would have been waitlisted several times before he was able to take the course.
He met with Jennifer Gargano to discuss how to move forward with the project, and they agreed to use the funds to bring a d.school instructor to Harker to hold a design thinking workshop for Harker teachers. “Every single person who came would be expected to implement and report on how they’re using design thinking, and that went off so well,” Kley Contini said.
Design thinking, Kley Contini explained, is “a user-centered design process” for creating products that incorporate knowledge of users’ needs as the main guideline. “If you are going to make this product, who is the end user? Who is the person who’s actually going to experience this product? Design thinking says you need to spend some significant time upfront getting to know who that user is, just as a person,” said Kley Contini.
“Product,” he added, can also be loosely defined. “This could be a physical product that you’re trying to sell. Or from a school standpoint, this could be products like a project or an essay or some kind of end assessment.”
In the workshop, teachers from all four campuses learned principles of design thinking that they could apply to their classroom instruction. Andy Gersh, middle school math teacher, began asking his students how they best learn the concepts he was teaching in class. He then had them create posters and infographics to explain to their classmates how they absorbed the lessons. Middle school science teacher Kathy Peng ’05 used design thinking to create lab exercises that were tailored to different student needs.
“It kind of opens students’ minds to the big [question] of, why are we learning this? What does it apply to? Do I need this outside of the four walls of this classroom? What’s the real application?” Kley Contini said. “I think that gets answered when you make kids think about who the end users are and their wants and needs.”
Although Harker offers many professional development opportunities, the Vegesna Teacher Excellence Program is unique in that it requires grant applicants to delineate how their proposed project will benefit students as well as the wider Harker community. To this end, grant awardees are frequently asked to speak at events such as all-faculty meetings. “We’ll create time for them to talk to other teachers and do other things so that it can have an effect beyond them,” Gargano said.
Teachers also are required to prepare presentations for the Vegesnas to show the results of their work. So far, they have been quite pleased with the work coming out of the program. “I see great progress made,” said Raju Vegesna. “I see the best results are coming out. I think we still have a long way to go, since we just started, but I’m very pleased with the progress Harker made with respect to this.”
For a complete list of Vegesna grant recipients, visit www.harker.org/teacher-professional-development
This article first appeared in the summer 2017 Harker Magazine.
Spanish teacher Abel Olivas is one of the few remaining teachers who started at Harker with the opening of the upper school. He serves as chair of the modern and classical languages department, is the faculty advisor for the Gender and Sexuality Alliance and the Spanish National Honor Society, and assists the Diversity Committee in various ways. A native of Texas whose life got off to a “really rough start,” his diverse interests and talents show a life well-lived and appreciated.
Q: What one piece of advice would you offer anyone who asks?
Don’t live your life for anyone else.
Q: What are you most proud of yourself for?
I got an MFA in writing and completed the manuscript for my memoir! My book details how grateful I am that my life turned out so nicely.
Q: What would constitute a perfect day for you?
After a solid eight hours of sleep, doing a couple of hours of fruitful writing; lunch at Books Inc. in Mountain View; another couple of hours of productive writing there; back home to listen to music and do some singing or dancing; a call with my mother or sister in Texas; and a nice, long dinner with my husband, Robert, at one of our favorite restaurants. My needs are simple!
Q: What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?
Getting my book published. Oh wait, it hasn’t happened yet. If/when it happens, it will be the greatest accomplishment of my life.
Q: What work of art has inspired you and why?
I’m inspired in my writing by writers and composers who have turned the stories of minority communities into art. “In the Heights,” my favorite musical of all time, resonates with me so much, I sing to the cast recording in my car all the time.
Q: What is your most treasured memory?
Exchanging wedding vows with Robert as my mother witnessed it lovingly from her seat in the front row.
This article first appeared in the summer 2017 Harker Magazine.
Patricia Burrows teaches middle school English, but her enthusiasm for her job is evident by all the other things she loves to do at Harker: she is the grade 7 advisory dean, facilitates the Discovery X mentor program, oversees the writing mentor program, and is on the Diversity and Challenge Success committees. It was clear as she spoke with Harker Magazine that her passions are her students and her family; she and her husband, Kit, have a daughter at Harker, and her parents and brother are in Ontario, Canada, where Burrows grew up.
Q: What is the one thing in the world you would fix if you could wave a magic wand?
I would give everyone empathy.
Q: What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?
“Comparison is the thief of joy.” My colleague Ann Smitherman shared this quote (generally attributed to Theodore Roosevelt) when I needed to hear it, and it is something that I carry with me every day. When we spend so much time wishing we were like someone else, we steal the opportunity to celebrate our own individual achievements and impacts.
Q: What is your best strength?
Helping others. Anything I first deem as a weakness eventually helps me understand and develop my strength.
Q: What are you doing when you feel most alive?
I’m in a classroom with my students, laughing, sharing and learning.
Q: What do you most apologize for?
Putting my foot in my mouth. I love to joke with people, and occasionally the joke is funnier in my head than in reality.
Q: What is your most treasured object and why?
A ceramic heart that my husband used to propose to me. Yes, I’m cheesy.
Q: What are you obsessed with?
“Anne of Green Gables.” I could watch the television series featuring Megan Follows over and over again.
This article originally appeared in the winter 2016 Harker Magazine.
Eric Nelson has the distinction of teaching nine different courses at the upper school, seven on a regular basis. He is the computer science department chair, runs the robotics program, and teaches a variety of science classes, including astronomy and physics.
Though born and (mostly) raised in the Southern California town of Downey, Nelson spent his middle and high school years in the Los Gatos mountains (and attended Los Gatos High School), and he keeps those roots alive by living in Boulder Creek.
He and his wife, Kathleen, have five children between them, including Chandler, who graduated from Harker last year, and two grandchildren. His pithy answers to our questions illustrate his humor and directness.
What makes you feel like a kid again?
Disneyland.
What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?
A professor, Dr. Michael Zeilik, said, “Be simple and direct.”
What are you doing when you feel most alive?
Standing quietly in the forest and just listening. Walking on an isolated beach, and again, just listening. Being able to focus on all the sensations, sights, smells and sounds where most people would simply find silence.
In what way are you above average?
I was an astrophysicist. What else do I need?
What is something that you pretend to understand when you really don’t?
Women.
Why do you do what you do?
Because I enjoy it. Life is too short to do something every day that you don’t enjoy doing.