Nicholas Manjoine has just accepted a reappointment to the 2012-13 AP French Language Development Committee. As part of his duties he will help implement testing for the AP French Language and Culture examination.
Before joining Harker in 1998 as a founding member of the faculty’s upper school where he delights in teaching a wide spectrum of French courses (from French I to AP language and advanced seminars), Manjoine held teaching posts at the secondary and university levels.
He also has taught in the English and history departments, teaching electives such as Great Novels, Speculative Fiction and Ethics. He has further served both as a reader and table leader for the AP French Literature and Language courses. A repeat recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities summer grants, Manjoine participated in month-long seminars focusing on “The Paris of Balzac, Baudelaire and Zola,” held in Paris in 2003, and “Modern French Theater” in Avignon during that city’s theater festival in 2009.
Committed to developing students’ linguistic and cultural experiences, Manjoine regularly leads students on study abroad trips such as the exchange program with Harker’s sister school in Fribourg, Switzerland, the Collège de Gambach.
When not teaching, Manjoine’s passion for lifelong learning lead him to pursue a second M.A. in liberal arts at Stanford University, which he will complete this year.
Middle school math teacher Vandana Kadam was named the Mathcounts Coach of the Week on Nov. 8. She was featured in a Q&A interview on the Mathcounts website, where she mentioned that she has been a Mathcounts coach for 10 years and has coached teams to the Mathcounts National Competition three times, including the most recent championship in May 2011.
Founded nearly 30 years ago, Mathcounts is an organization that fosters the education of middle school math students nationwide by holding competitions at local and national levels. Through written and oral exercises in both individual and team competitions, students learn essential critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Parents were welcomed to the Harker campuses in September for a series of Back-to-School events. The upper school held its event on Sept. 10, allowing parents to tour the upper school campus, visit classrooms and hear upper school teachers talk about their classes and teaching methods. Student club representatives also set up tables in Nichols Hall to give parents a look at the different clubs their students can join.
The lower school held two Back-to-School Nights, one for grades 4-5 on Sept. 12, and another for grades 1-3 on Sept. 13. Both had parents touring the Bucknall gym, where teachers had tables and displays set up containing information about their classes. They also toured the campus and attended demonstrations by Harker teachers in their classrooms.
Finally, the middle school Back-to-School Night on Sept. 15 also took parents to presentations in classrooms, and science teacher Daniel Sommer even got the parents involved in a basic science project. Middle school art teacher Elizabeth Saltos entertained her audience with some very creative hat designs.
This article was originally published in the Fall 2011 Harker Quarterly.
Students are not the only ambitious Harker people who search out internships and learning opportunities over the summer. Our faculty kept busy with a variety of summer projects.
Science Teacher Studies Nanotechnology at Stanford
Raji Swaminathan, grade 7 science teacher, spent time at Stanford learning about nanotechnology at their Summer Institute for Middle School Teachers (SIMST). Nanoscience is the study of incredibly small things to the order of a billionth of a meter. Swaminathan was particularly interested in how the immunology field is using nanotech to help combat diseases. She also learned about the workings of STMs and ATMs, Scanning Tunneling Microscopes and Atomic Force Microscopes, which help scientists understand the atoms of different materials. Her students can plan on some excellent new activities when they study rates of reaction and learn about the workings of atoms.
Teacher Invited to Educational Testing Team
Enni Chen, grade 2 science teacher, worked with the Educational Testing Service (ETS), known best by students and parents for their STAR tests, this summer. Chen was asked to work with the ETS team in Sacramento that administers the STAR test due to her “solid background in teaching and research,” said Mary Arcilla, the associate director of the STAR program. Chen was instrumental in recruiting members to ETS committees to share their insights on special populations in California. Chen also helped organize a field test ETS will be conducting in September, recruiting districts and individual schools to participate. Chen was recognized for her initiative and outside-of- the-box thinking, two qualities her students look forward to seeing in her classroom this year.
Music Teacher Completes Doctorate in Music Education
Dave Hart, middle school music teacher, finished his doctorate in music education at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Hart’s focus was both in music education and performance in jazz trumpet. Hart was brought to Harker after finishing his three years of course work, which included performing, lecturing on the effects of improvisation and musical education, and teaching at undergraduate and after-school programs. The research component of his dissertation focused on the positive impact of improvisation on students’ abilities to understand and learn music. Hart currently leads the middle school orchestra and jazz band in improvisational practices, something that is often overlooked in musical education programs. Be sure to request a spontaneous number or two at the next jazz concert or a duet featuring Hart and his wife, Leslie, a French horn player who also earned her doctorate at Eastman.
English Teacher’s Poetry Introduces Art Display in N.Y.
Alexandra Mattraw Rosenboom, an award-winning poetess and Harker English teacher, had a Harker-inspired poem included in “Black and White,” the summer 2011 exhibition of New York’s Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition. The show, which ran July 16-Aug. 21, was in a huge Civil War-era coffee warehouse, and Rosenboom’s poem, “Inside the Construction: The Brain,” was mounted and displayed at the entrance. “The poem was inspired by notes I took during our February faculty retreat,” said Rosenboom. The guest speaker at the retreat was a neuroscientist who discussed the way we develop thoughts. “Because my poem explores how humans think in black and white before our brain processes things in color, it worked quite well with the show’s theme,” she said. In addition, Rosenboom has two poems in the latest American Letters & Commentary, issue 22.
This article was originally published in the Fall 2011 Harker Quarterly.
Over the summer, several teachers received grants from the Harker Tech Grant program to discover new ways in which technology could help them in the classroom. Started roughly 10 years ago, the program has since helped dozens of teachers become more well-rounded and effective educators by expanding their teaching skill sets as well as their ability to receive, track and organize information.
Upper school theater teacher Jeffrey Draper explored how video editing techniques could be used to create online videos that combined images, PowerPoint presentations, lecture notes and interviews. “I want students to see my prepared materials as homework in place of classroom lectures,” Draper said. “Then we can work with the information in the classroom through quizzes and discussions rather than having me deliver the lecture material in class and not have the time to address the information with the students in person.”
Draper wants to finish 10 videos by the end of 2011 and improve them as needed through editing. “I will be working more with video editing over the course of the year to improve the quality of the videos,” he said, “and I look forward to sharing any techniques I learn that may be useful to other teachers.”
Jonathan Brusco and Andrea Milius, middle school history teachers, decided to make their curriculum more diverse and robust by providing online resources for their students. “We rewrote our curriculum and we identified all the standards, and we created our benchmarks that matched with the standards,” Milius said. To meet these benchmarks, a large number of online resources are provided that include both required and supplemental information. “It supplements, but it can also be extra information that we want students to read, and so we’re not just dictated by our textbook,” said Milius. Lower school librarian Kathy Clark and middle school librarian Bernie Morrissey were “instrumental” in helping the two teachers find resources, Milius said.
AP Psychology teacher Kelly Horan opted to leverage the rapidly growing field of mobile technologies for her tech grant project, which used an iPhone app called Assessa that allows her to collect data sent to her by students, evaluate it and send it back to them. Horan’s students lead class discussions throughout the year, during which they collect data based on a rubric that is posted online. The iPhone app allows her to keep all of the necessary information sent to her by students in one place. “I was just having a hard time keeping all of the paperwork together,” she said.
Cyrus Merrill, middle school history teacher, created videos of all of his content lectures and uploaded them to YouTube. He also adapted his classroom for multimedia use. “I converted my room into a black box theater with curtains on all the walls so I can make my room into a theater and focus student attention on specific parts of the wall or only certain screens,” he said. He created a setup that allows him to hang screens on each wall and display images and video clips on them.
“I also researched what I call FAME (fashion, art, music and entertainment) throughout the eight units I teach to incorporate specific social history activities that are hands-on for the most part,” he said.
The purpose of Merrill’s project was to make his classroom more interactive and participatory, and to allow his students to have access to basic points of lectures at home. “I hope it will inspire my students to see class as a dynamic experience with rich visuals and context to put the content into,” he said.
This article was originally published in the Fall 2011 Harker Quarterly.
On June 15, Harker held its sixth annual Harker Teacher Institute to give educators around the Bay Area the chance to learn about how new instructional techniques and technologies can assist them in the classroom.
Various sessions were held at the upper school campus by Harker faculty and staff, who demonstrated the many different new technology tools available to teachers. In one session, Michael Schmidt, middle school computer science teacher, demonstrated Scratch, a new open-source programming language that is designed to make programming a fun and engaging activity for children and teenagers. Paul Vallerga, a teacher and designer in Harker’s performing arts department, showed how teachers could use Google SketchUp, a free 3-D modeling tool, for student art projects, demonstrations and more.
Other classes showed how already popular tools could be leveraged in new and very useful ways. Mark Gelineau and Rebecca Williams, middle school English teachers, held a session to show how teachers could greatly reduce the stress of grading papers by using macros in Microsoft Word. Wolfram|Alpha, as upper school math teacher Bradley Stoll demonstrated, could be used as a statistical research resource as well as a mathematics tool.
Other classes focused on effective teaching techniques, such as upperschool Spanish teacher Diana Moss’ session on how poetry can be integrated into all levels of Spanish classes. Susan Nace, upper school music teacher, held a session to help teachers relax and reconnect “what you do with who you are,” using the arts and spirited conversation as a means to rejuvenate their passion for teaching.
This year’s Teacher Institute was once again sponsored by Silicon Valley Computer Using Educators (SVCUE), the local chapter of Computer Using Educators, a nonprofit corporation that aims to use technology to improve student achievement. It was hosted by Harker and Dan Hudkins, instructional technology director, Fred Triefenbach, upper school assistant technology director, Lisa Diffenderfer, lower school assistant technology director and Angela Neff, former middle school assistant technology director.
To celebrate Veterans Day, a special assembly was held for grades 4 and 5 during which a film on the history of Veterans Day was shown. It was followed by a brief talk on the life of a soldier by upper school math teacher Anthony Silk, who spent two years in the U.S. Navy flying the electronic warfare plane the EA-6B Prowler.
In his speech, Silk talked about how members of the military, be they in the Navy, Army, Air Force or Marines, all share three things: “a love of the United States, a desire to serve and a willingness to sacrifice.”
Silk’s speech delved into each one of these areas. Because of the love of their country, he said, soldiers feel a duty to ensure that American citizens can continue to enjoy their freedom and way of life. “We want you to have the safety and freedom to choose what you want to do with your life,” he said. “We are very proud of what we do.”
Soldiers’ desire to serve, he said, often takes them to faraway places where they may be separated from loved ones for long periods. This was also a part of his third point, sacrifice. “But sacrifice can mean much more,” he continued. “Being in the military is often very dangerous. People get hurt, some are killed. But while it can be scary, the reason we leave our families for a while, and the reason we take those risks, is because we believe that we are making the world safer.”
Harker had a great time for a great cause Saturday, coming in second place at the third annual Silicon Valley Trivia Challenge, and donating their winnings back to the host, Junior League of San Jose, for their charitable work.
Held Nov. 7 at Club Auto Sport in San Jose, and mentioned in the San Jose Mercury News the next day, this entertaining fundraiser for the Junior League’s worthwhile education-based charitable work featured county tax assessor Larry Stone as judge and NBC news weatherperson Mike Inouye as the affable master of ceremonies. The first two years of the event Harker sent two faculty teams; this year the school sent one faculty team and one alumni team. The faculty team, Harker Eagle Eggheads, was composed of Brian Larsen, upper school performing arts; Lisa Masoni, middle school Latin; Stacie Newman, middle school English; and Anthony Silk, upper school math. The alumni team, Harker’s Lean Green Knowledge Machine, consisted of Christina Yan ’93, Harker’s alumni director; Ramesh Srinivasan ’93; and Ab Belani and Edward Hejtmanek, both ’06 and employed at Somaxis, a start-up in the health, wellness and fitness industry.
Teams were encouraged to dress in costume and bring props, and the clever themes, raffle drawings, tasty food stations, audience participation opportunities, beautiful cars on display and smooth organization by Junior League volunteers all added up to a winning event.
After the first round of 20 questions half the teams were eliminated, and a second round eliminated all but the top few. Both Harker teams had a great time answering questions on history, pop culture, sports, literature and music, with the faculty team ultimately winning second place and the alumni just missing placement in the top three. Harker promptly donated the $1,000 prize money back to the Junior League to support their community work.
For more information about the event, and the Junior League of San Jose, visit http://www.jlsj.org/sanjose/npo.jsp?pg=home, and save the date for next year’s event: Sat., Nov. 5, 2011.
Seniors claimed the title as winners Oct. 6 when they beat the class of 2013 and then the faculty in the final dodgeball matches of this year’s upper school tournament. A week prior, juniors defeated the freshmen, placing them in third. Each class will receive points in hopes of winning the spirit award at the end of the year.
As summer drew to a close, Craig Pasqua, Harker tennis director, traveled to Flushing, N.Y., to volunteer at Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day 2010, held Aug. 28 at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. According to Pasqua, who was attending the event for the third straight year, more than 30,000 children and adults used the 18 available tennis courts, which included Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Pasqua was busy giving lessons for the United States Tennis Association Serves Foundation, a charitable corporation that offers support to programs that serve at-risk children and people with disabilities.
While in New York, Pasqua also attended the USTA Tennis Teachers Conference, which took place during the U.S. Open. He attended speaking engagements with several well-known tennis coaches, including Tom Gullikson, Jose Higueras, Oscar Wegner, Mary Joe Fernandez, Tracy Austin, Cliff Drysdale and Billie Jean King. In addition, he was able to meet a number of young rising stars, such as Melanie Oudin and Coco Vandeweghe. He even had a chance meeting with alumna and former varsity tennis player Brittany Chu ’10, who was preparing for her first year at Columbia University.
Pasqua announced during the conference that he would be stepping down as the chairman of the USTA diversity committee in November, but said he looked forward “to joining the USTA’s community tennis committee, as my own nonprofit, Standing Tall Tennis, will begin serving the San Jose American Indian community this fall.”
Finally, besides getting to view the U.S. Open tennis tournament, Pasqua was also able to attend a taping of “Late Night With David Letterman.”