Late last month, Bradley Stoll, mathematics department chair, was named the recipient of an Inspirational Teacher Award from MIT. Alumna Lorraine Wong ’13 nominated Stoll for the award, saying of him, “I am immensely grateful that you believed in me in math, and more importantly, in life, and that you are not afraid to share your belief that being a kind human is more important than getting the best grades in a class.”
Stoll expressed gratitude at being nominated and said he was honored by Wong’s sentiments. “Lorraine’s nomination will be a constant reminder to me that I need to see and treat each student as an individual and not compartmentalize them by their grades,” he said “that I need to be compassionate, that sometimes I need to be their teacher, sometimes I need to be their friend.”
In early November, four teachers came together to form the Harker Eggheads, our entry in the sixth annual Silicon Valley Trivia Challenge, hosted by the Junior League. For the sixth year in a row, Harker blazed through the first two rounds and made it to the finals, one of 10 teams out of the original 40 to make it that far. Though we didn’t win (quick: name every type of Girl Scout cookie!) a great time was had by all and, as always, we were proud to support the San Jose/Silicon Valley Junior League and its fine works. This year’s Eggheads, teachers Lisa Masoni, Henry Cuningham, Andy Wicklund and Ellen Austin, represented Harker beautifully!
This story originally appeared in the fall 2013 Harker Quarterly.
For more than a decade, Harker’s summer tech grant program has enabled Harker teachers to find new and exciting ways to enhance and diversify the ways they teach, whether it be creating engaging presentations, providing students with access to more learning resources or simply finding better ways to organize homework and in-class assignments.
Lower school English teacher Katie Molin decided to acclimate herself more to some of the Chromebook applications that her students will be using during the year. “As an English teacher, I’m always interested in ways to make the teaching of essay writing easier, the grading of essays more efficient, and the feedback more meaningful,” she said.
To accomplish this, she learned how to use Google Docs as a way for students to submit their work. “Google Docs will allow me to give the students more detailed feedback on their writing. It will be easier for them to edit their work, and I will know when they think they have ‘fixed’ the problem,” she said. “Their work will be stored and accessible now in a way it wasn’t before.”
Molin’s students will also use Blogger, another Google product, to post responses to short stories. She also plans to use her own blog to inform parents about their students’ classwork.
In order to show lower and middle school English teachers how to use Membean, a new online vocabulary program, English teacher Patricia Lai Burrows created tools that explained how the program works and how to show students to use it. “I created videos using Google Hangout on Air to navigate through the Membean teacher dashboard, understand the class statistics and create quizzes,” she said. “As part of this process, I learned how to create YouTube channels to house all my videos, and also to include Google Effects to enhance and add some humor to the presentations.”
Burrows said her training tools would help ease the burden on teachers as they prepared for another school year. “I know how daunting it is for a teacher to have to learn a new tool while prepping for the coming year and adjusting to all the other changes that naturally occur in a new year,” she said. “I wanted to create resources that would manage teacher stress associated with learning a completely new program like this one.”
She further added that the tech grant program is a great opportunity for faculty to learn skills that will benefit both themselves and their students. “I am grateful that the school encourages this kind of professional development, and it appears to me to be a win-win situation,” she said.
Building on their tech grant project from last year, upper school librarian Meredith Cranston and history teacher Julie Wheeler created an online area where AP Government students can create websites devoted to a topic they will be focusing on during the school year.
“We liked the political discussions they were having on the blog, but we wanted them to get more into media analysis, looking at where they were getting their political news, what perspectives these news sources might have, and just thinking a little more critically about media messages in general,” Cranston said.
This story originally appeared in the fall 2013 Harker Quarterly.
Upper school registrar Derek Kameda was invited to present at the Advanced Placement Summer Institute for Administrators in June in Jacksonville, Fla. There, he gave presentations on how to improve testing performance and AP score reports. Kameda has previously lent his skills as an AP coordinator consultant to test coordinators so that they might more effectively administer AP exams.
At the National Junior Classical League Convention held at the University of Nevada – Las Vegas this July, upper school Latin teacher John Hawley received a silver bowl for attending 20 NJCL conventions. The bowl was presented by Harker alumni and former JCLers Richard Kwant ‘07 and Ruchi Srivastava ’08, who gave moving speeches about Hawley’s influence as their teacher and JCL sponsor.
In July, middle school science teacher Daniel Sommer went on a professional development trip to Hawaii’s Big Island for a five-day field course, Geosciences of the Big Island. “Fantastic class!” he noted.
The expedition, including exploration of the island’s geologic wonders, is designed especially for educators. In a range of activities, class members climbed the famous Kilauea volcano to view the summit caldera and lava flows and to the summit of Mauna Kea (the highest volcanic mountain in Hawaii) to view glacial deposits, and explored Hawaiian reef formations by snorkel.
Middle school history teacher Jonathan Brusco spent part of his summer attending a three-day, invitation-only conference at Stanford University. The event, sponsored by SPICE, an international studies program at Stanford, and the Hana Financial Group, a Korean investment company, was about incorporating Korean history into school curriculum.
“The conference was extremely beneficial and featured guest speakers and curriculum ideas,” recalled Brusco, adding that it vastly expanded his knowledge of both Korean history and culture. He said he plans to utilize many of the things he learned during the conference with his Harker students this year.
In other news, Brusco serves on the board of trustees at Gavilan College in Gilroy and recently started a new subcommittee that is going to include board members of all the college’s feeder high school districts.
“We will be tackling student success at the college with the hope that we can lower remediation rates and thus be able to offer more career-oriented programs to our students and better serve the district as a whole,” said Brusco, who was recently featured in an article about this subject in the Morgan Hill Times.
Sue Smith, library director, and Lauri Vaughan, upper school librarian, contributed an article to the journal of the California School Library Association. In the article, they detail how they have used LibGuides software to promote information literacy among students and how they have worked with teachers to provide quality resources for student research.
At press time, Harker Quarterly learned that “Growing Schools: Librarians as Professional Developers,” a book Smith had previously contributed a chapter to, has just been added to the recommended reading list of the U.S. Department of Education.
Abigail Joseph, middle school computer science teacher, ran a one- week Mobile App Entrepreneurship Camp in Oakland under the auspices of Black Girls Code, an organization dedicated to providing young and pre-teen girls of color opportunities to learn in-demand skills in technology and computer programming at a time when they are naturally thinking about what they want to be when they grow up.
“The camp focused on mobile app creation from concept to development,” said Joseph. “Students learned to use MIT App Inventor and were able test the app out on mobile phones. The camp ended with a field trip to the Facebook campus, where students pulled together their final app prototypes and a business plan for their ideas with Facebook employees. Of course the highlight was getting to meet Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.”
Her group was 21 girls strong and Joseph noted, “The most rewarding part was seeing the girls leave the camp with a desire to learn more and continue working on their projects on their own.”
Joseph has been involved with opening technology up to girls for some time. “I have been actively involved in Black Girls Code since the spring of this year,” she said. “In addition to the summer camp, I have been the technical lead for a build-a-webpage-in-a-day workshop in the Mission in San Francisco.”
Now successful in the technology field, Joseph is committed to giving back. “As a child, I benefited from a similar program that sparked my interest in computer science, and kept me in the pipeline to pursue it and get my Ph.D. It has always been my dream to create or be a part of a program that provides the same opportunities for young people of color to know that they have choices when choosing careers, and that computer science and engineering can be among them. I am happy to provide young girls of color opportunities and paths to walk in my footsteps and the footsteps of other black female computer scientists.”
This story originally appeared in the fall 2013 Harker Quarterly. Harker’s ongoing commitment to improving its environmental standards has led to the formation of the Green Committee, a group of faculty and staff working to formulate and execute a strategy toward making Harker a greener school both practically and culturally.
“The committee’s a way to … get people together to share ideas in terms of projects we want to do and how to carry out those projects,” said Jeff Sutton, the upper school science teacher who leads the committee along with fellow science teacher Kate Schafer.
The people who would eventually form the committee, which is made up of people from all of Harker’s divisions, first met in late 2012 to discuss a long-term plan for furthering Harker’s green efforts. The committee came up with seven areas in which Harker could improve: energy conservation, waste reduction, reducing the use of toxic chemicals, instituting more shuttles and encouraging carpooling to reduce pollution, improving water quality, creating greener schoolyards and improving student food choices in order to offer more healthy foods.
Prior to the forming of the committee, there were initiatives in place across Harker’s three campuses. “We wanted to bring all those initiatives together and really collect and collate our ideas and our efforts and make them unified across pre-K through 12,” said Chris Nikoloff, head of school. “It was really more of a way of honoring a lot of good work and just trying to bring it all together to take it to the next level.”
The committee is currently working to establish a baseline that will offer them a better picture of what needs to be done going forward, with a focus on energy usage and waste reduction. “One of the things that we have realized that we need to do is get more details than we did in our initial research,” said Schafer. “One of things that we’re going to be working on, with the help of other Green Committee members, is conducting some of those audits.”
In the coming year, the committee hopes to conduct an audit of all the waste that is created on the three K-12 campuses over a period of 24 hours and determine 1) how much of it could have avoided being sent to a landfill; 2) how much could have been recycled or composted; and 3) what portion did not need to be created at all. One future goal is to purchase an industrial composter and start a pilot composting program at the upper school. This would allow the campus to reduce all biodegradable food waste, including all paper cups and paper products, and quickly break them down into compost instead of discarding them as landfill fodder. At a meeting in January, the committee decided to launch an energy reduction campaign in the spring of 2013 to encourage stu- dents, faculty and staff to turn off lights and close laptops in order to reduce energy usage across all campuses. According to Sutton, the campaign yielded “mixed results,” as the energy bills from those months were roughly the same as previous months. “From our little experiment, it’s not people having their laptops plugged in so much,” said Sutton. “I’m sure that makes a difference, but there’s something bigger, like an air conditioner or a refrigerant or a heater that’s causing the draw.” The committee is looking into software that will assist in discovering where Harker has opportunities to become more energy efficient. Some progress has already been made in the form of lighting upgrades at the upper school and preschool campuses. “Over the course of the summer and into the coming year, all four of our campuses will have gone through a lighting energy efficiency audit by an independent PG&E vendor,” said Mike Bassoni, the school’s facility manager. “Through grant monies made available by PG&E, we have to date received more than $40,000 in energy-efficient lighting upgrades.”
Similar upgrades are also in store for the middle and lower school campuses, pending review. The upgrades to the upper school and preschool campuses alone are expected to save the school more than $33,000 a year in energy costs. Another crucial part of the Green Committee’s plans is to get student buy-in and involvement for the initiatives. “Once we figure out as a committee what our goals are, then I’m going to be the one that goes to the kids and says, ‘OK, we want to realize some goals, would you like to join us?’” said Diana Moss, upper school Spanish teacher and dean of the Class of 2015. Moss is being joined by upper school math teacher and Class of 2014 dean Victor Adler in this effort. Representatives from other campuses, including middle school math teacher Margaret Huntley, middle school history teacher Andy Keller, lower school math and science teacher Enni Chen and lower school art teacher Gerry-louise Robinson, all plan to get students on their respective campuses involved. During the spring 2013 semester, new water fountains were installed at the upper school that dispense filtered water and have replaced traditional bottled water dispensers. These are also part of an ongoing effort to reduce paper waste by encouraging students and staff to bring water bottles to use instead of paper cups, which will supplement other waste reduction efforts such as paper recycling and cell phone and battery drop-off stations. Faculty and staff are also being encouraged to get into the habit of bringing coffee mugs to work. In addition, a new student group called Brilliant Organizers of Students Sustainability (BOSS) has been formed and will be working with the Green Committee on student-led sustainability projects.
Over the summer, Moss had the opportunity to research how students at other schools participated in their schools’ green efforts. “They’re doing some amazing things. Kids are fired up and they’re actually leading these initiatives,” she said. Part of her plan to increase student involvement is to have them network and share ideas with students at other schools. “Eventually I see the Green Committee as being a mixed group of student leaders and faculty and staff who are also interested in sustainability,” she said. The committee hopes that one day Harker can be certified as both a California Green Business and a Green Ribbon school. To do so will require fulfilling requirements set by both programs. “Schools are particularly challenging because they do so many different things,” Schafer said. “We have pools, we have food service, we have all of these different components. We’re almost a like a little mini-city in and of ourselves.” Even though their goals may be lofty, Sutton said that having “big goals” can offer a point of inspiration necessary to motivate the Harker community into making a big push to make the school more environmentally responsible. “That’s one of our major goals going forward, too: to make this Green Committee not a committee but an ideology, where it lives beyond the life of the people who are here now.”
In late June, middle school math teacher Vandana Kadam traveled to Turkey to participate in the Junior Balkan Mathematical Olympiad (JBMO). It was the first time the U.S. had been invited to compete in the event, and Kadam acted as an observer on a panel of 25 mathematicians who selected problems for the exam that was administered at the JBMO.
“I was one of only two women on this panel,” Kadam said. “It has been a highly rewarding experience for me.”
The United States team placed fourth out of the 21 countries competing in the Olympiad, with all six members of the team earning medals, including three gold, one silver and two bronze. The team had the second-highest number of gold medals behind Turkey, who had four.
This article was originally published in the summer 2013 Harker Quarterly. Read the complete issue at http://bit.ly/10W17nX.
The advancement department proudly reported that Harker faculty reached a record level of 100 percent participation in this year’s annual giving campaign.
At a recent faculty meeting, Joe Rosenthal, executive director of advancement, thanked teachers for going “all in” to support Harker students. To celebrate the achievement, all three campuses held separately organized faculty free dress days.
Rosenthal thanked members of the Faculty Development Council (FDC), a group working to increase faculty participation in the annual giving process, and encouraged others to join in. As a result of the record-setting faculty/staff drive, many parents were also inspired to make a gift or pledge to the campaign.
This year’s FDC members:
• Representing the lower school: Michelle Anderson, Diann Chung, Jared Ramsey, Eileen Schick and Grace Wallace.
• Representing the middle school: Jonathan Brusco, Monica Colletti, Keith Hirota, Vandana Kadam, Andy Keller and Pat White.
• Representing the upper school: Victor Adler, Chris Colletti, Chris Florio, John Heyes, Andrew Irvine, Smriti Koodanjeri, Eric Nelson, Sue Smith, Bradley Stoll and Troy Thiele.
Middle school history teacher Andrea Milius loves spending her days speaking about events from the past. Last month, however, the inspiring instructor made a little history of her own after being selected as the first Harker faculty member to travel to Turkey on an impressive two-week historic and culturally-based teacher training trip.
Milius heard about “this wonderful opportunity” through a resource she had been working with for professional development called ORIAS (The Office of Resources for International and Area Studies). Sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley, ORIAS provides scholarly resources and professional development for K-12 and community college educators.
Her application to be considered for the trip consisted of a series of essay questions focused on the incorporation of global education and international perspectives into her curriculum, especially with concern to the Middle East and Islam.
The unique travel program was offered through the Middle Eastern Studies Center at Ohio State University, which strives to peacefully bridge gaps dividing people along cultural, ethnic and religious lines.
Aided by a Turkish guide named Serkand, Milius and nine other lucky trip recipients (ranging from teachers, curriculum writers, librarians and even an international lawyer) gained firsthand knowledge of the Middle East, its past and current economic, social and political developments.
The goal of the trip was to enable participants to return to their work in the United States better equipped to promote teaching, learning, research and public awareness of the diverse array of Middle Eastern languages, cultures and peoples.
“The trip achieved its objectives. I feel honored to have participated, and I am so thankful that Harker supported me in this endeavor. I learned so much about Turkish daily life and culture as well as the many intricate details about the actual practice of Islam, even though this was one of my major areas of research in graduate school,” reported Milius.
“Major trip highlights were collaborating and interacting with other instructors, getting fresh and innovative teaching ideas and gaining an understanding of Turkey’s impact on current world affairs,” she added.
During the trip, she visited all of the major historical sites of Istanbul: Ankara and Konya, The Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, Sulaimaniya Mosque, the Grand Bazaar, the tomb of the poet Rumi at Konya and a boat tour of the Bosphorus, complete with dolphin sightings. Milius and her fellow participants also veered off the tourist path, visiting public and private schools in the country and having informative meetings with Turkey’s ministers of education and finance.
“Andrea is shy to blow her own horn, but this program was extremely competitive. Having lived in Turkey for three years, I can assure you it was a dream trip that few people could do on their own, certainly not within two weeks! It’s nice to see the amazing things our teachers are doing,” enthused middle school Spanish instructor Susan Moling, who informed Harker News Online about Milius’ incredible experience.
To Kendricks “Ken” Allen, Harker’s new dean of lower school students, there is nothing like the sound of children at play. And, from where he sits in his office – located adjacent to the gymnasium and across from Rincon Field – students are never very far away.
“I like being where the action is!” enthused Allen, whose office is adorned with diplomas and pictures with the motivating words “respect,” “integrity” and “success.”
Allen has long enjoyed working with youngsters, having previously been an elementary school teacher at Fort Worth County Day School in Texas, where he also served as head track and field coach, assistant varsity football coach and assistant head coach for varsity girls basketball.
A native of Illinois, he was raised in Colorado, where his family still resides. He comes to Harker with an undergraduate degree in exercise and sports science from Colorado State University along with a master’s in education administration from Texas Christian University.
This past July Allen got married and relocated here from Texas. With so many exciting yet major life changes he credits fellow administrators, staff and colleagues with enabling him to quickly settle in and feel confident in his new role at Harker.
Allen has been working hard at getting to know many of the 596 students who attend the lower school. To that end, he employed a unique method of having students with locker troubles come to his office for help at the start of the school year.
“That way I was able to immediately start getting to know them individually,” said Allen, who is steadily learning the Harker community of students, parents, faculty and staff members. In fact, this first year one of his priorities will be simply to listen and observe.
“Harker is a very special community, and I’m proud to be a part of it,” he said, adding, “I love my job!”
This story recently appeared in the winter 2012 edition of Harker Quarterly.
Upper school English teacher and prolific poet Alexandra Rosenboom’s latest chapbook, “In the Way of Harbors,” was recently accepted for publication by the Chicago-based independent publisher Dancing girl Press. One of the poems in the chapbook, “Reconstruction: Christchurch, New Zealand,” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, which is awarded to the best poetry and literature published in small presses. “It’s fairly special and unusual to be nominated for this prize in the poetry world, so I am really thrilled to get the news,” Rosenboom said. The chapbook is scheduled to be available some time between January and April 2013. For more information on the publisher, visit the Dancing girl Press website here, at www.dancinggirlpress.com.
Derek Kameda, upper school registrar, hosted an Advance Placement coordinator workshop at the upper school campus, the first time Harker has hosted such an event. Last year, Kameda joined the College Board’s Consultant Advisory Panel, which provides oversight pertaining to managing and supporting consultants of the College Board. As an Advanced Placement coordinator consultant, he has offered his expertise to AP coordinators to help them improve how they administer AP exams.
Office of Communication writer and novelist DebbieCohen’s book, “Keeper of the Scale,” recently reached the top 100 free downloads for women’s contemporary fiction on Amazon.com. The story follows three women who form a support group to help one another lose weight, but soon learn more about each another than they had originally planned. The Kindle edition of the book is available on Amazon.com.