On the evening of Jan. 22, about 40 kindergartners and their families gathered in the lower school gym lobby for a festive Valentine’s Day-themed party. After enjoying a yummy pizza dinner, participants enjoyed making Valentine’s Day-related arts and crafts.
Tags: Featured Story Photo, Lower SchoolMiddle and upper school student musicians performed this year’s Winter Concert at San Jose’s Mexican Heritage Plaza Theater Jan. 15-16. Dave Hart directed the middle school groups, starting with the Grade 6 Jazz Band, which kicked things off with pieces by Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Herbie Hancock. The Grade 6 Orchestra then took the stage, performing Soon Hee Newbold’s “Spirit of the American West,” the traditional folk song “Scarborough Fair” and “Russian Sailor’s Dance” by Reinhold Gliere.
The Grade 6 Orchestra’s cello section – made up of Rachel Broweleit, Nathan Wang, Rani Sheth, Jacqueline Yang and Jeffrey Yang, grade 8; and Andrew Chang and Elaine Xiao, grade 7 – performed a rendition of “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 1 Preludio Modinha” by Villa Lobos. Shortly afterward, teachers Teresa Orozco (flute), Pierre Dazin (violin), Natachia Li (cello) and Joshua Thurston-Milgrom (double bass) gave a special performance.
Next up, the Grade 7-8 Jazz Band played well-received versions of Jimmy Forrest’s “Night Train,” Horace Silver’s “Cape Verdean Blues,” “Fly Me to the Moon” by Bart Howard and more. They were followed by the Grade 7-8 Orchestra, which played the traditional “Amazing Grace,” “Variations on a Korean Folk Song” by John Barnes Chance and “Fandango and Alborada” by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Upper school music teacher Chris Florio then took over as director, starting with the upper school’s Lab Band, which performed Ben Tucker’s “Comin’ Home Baby,” “Sky Dive” by Freddie Hubbard and others. The jazz continued with the stylings of The Harker School Jazz Band, which performed a set of songs by greats such as Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and George Gershwin.
After an intermission, the evening’s headliner, The Harker School Orchestra, played the first of several pieces, Leonard Bernstein’s “Overture to Candide.” The group then impressively performed Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Capriccio Espagnol” in its entirety, followed by the rousing “Rodeo” by Aaron Copland. The orchestra then made way for flutist Victoria Ding, grade 12, who gave a solo performance of Cécile Chaminade’s “Concertino for Flute and Orchestra, Op. 7.”
The orchestra gave a fitting close to the evening with Camille Saint-Saëns’ stirring “Danse Bacchanale.”
Tags: Featured Story Photo, Performing ArtsHarker DECA chapter members garnered 19 top three wins at the annual Silicon Valley Career Development Conference in early January and 42 teams received mini awards. In addition to the excellent competitive results, three members were elected to the Silicon Valley District Action Team for the 2016-17 year: Alisa Su, grade 10, as vice president of public relations; Erin Liu, grade 9, as vice president of fashion; and Haley Tran, grade 11, as executive vice president.
Members placing in the top three are as follows:
First Place
Second Place
Third Place
Harker DECA members stayed at the San Jose Marriott, the convention host hotel, on Friday night and competed all day on Saturday. Competitions are divided into two categories: written events and role plays. Written events are competitions in which students create business plans and then present them to the judge. In role plays, competitors are given an allotted amount of time to read and analyze a case study, then present it to the judge.
The convention came to a close at the awards ceremony on Sunday morning, starting with the mini awards, followed by breakfast, then the grand awards.
“The energy when a Harker DECA member won was unprecedented, and all the other students in the room were shocked by the amount of energy our chapter brought,” noted Vanessa Tyagi, grade 10, director of communications for Harker DECA.
“The support for each competitor was unbelievable,” added Alexander Mo, grade 11, Harker DECA’s director of written events. “I really think that Harker DECA impressed schools not only with our competitive results, but also our bond as a chapter. I am so excited to see what we can achieve at states!”
Club members prepared for the conference by holding study sessions every Friday and Saturday in the Innovation Center.
“The feeling when I heard my name being called up on to the stage was amazing. All the late nights and hard work were definitely worth it. Just thinking about being on stage and receiving the trophy gives me chills, it was such a surreal experience,” noted Ashna Chandra, grade 10, Harker DECA director of membership.
“I had a really good time at SVCDC this year,” said Shaan Gagneja, grade 10. “I was a finalist in both events that I competed in, and an overall finalist in my written event. I got to meet new people and expand my social network. This conference was an overall success for Harker DECA, and I can’t wait for the rest of the competitive season.”
“We’ve had the best competitive results this year since the inception of the business and entrepreneurship department,” said Sophia Luo, grade 12, Harker DECA CEO. “Thanks to our newly formed Officer Mentorship Program, many of our members worked one-on-one with experienced officers and achieved competitive excellence. I’m so proud of everyone, mentors and mentees alike.”
Tags: Featured Story Photo, topacademicsEach year around Thanksgiving, the middle school kicks off the holiday season with its canned food drive. With the “season of giving” now behind us, Lorena Martinez, BEST director for the middle school, reflected on the success of this year’s drive, which was hosted by the Service Club in conjunction with Second Harvest Food Bank.
“Last year, millions of Americans lived in homes without enough food to eat, some of them in our own backyard,” reported Martinez, noting that canned and non-perishable food items were collected in containers located in advisory rooms throughout the Blackford campus.
At the start of the drive, Martinez had told the students, “if we collect 5,000 cans, approximately 10 cans per student, Mr. Hathaway and I will dress up as turkeys before Thanksgiving break!” Although they didn’t meet the 5,000-can challenge, students felt great about helping those less fortunate during the holidays.
“It’s wonderful to be able to have fun while helping out those less fortunate. … Together we can make a difference in someone’s life,” noted Martinez.
In other news, middle school students also are collecting toiletries and assembling packets to take to a local women’s and children’s shelter. This project will continue throughout the school year.
Tags: Featured Story Photo, OutreachThe Harker Speaker Series and an audience of about 80 welcomed author and historian Dennis McNally on Jan. 14. McNally’s biography of Jack Kerouac, “Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America,” was first published in 1979. He then spent much of the 1980s and ’90s traveling with the Grateful Dead, publishing “A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead” in 2002. Prior to the appearance, he met and conversed with a group of Harker students who are currently studying Kerouac’s work.
McNally began his talk by sharing how he came to be an authority on Kerouac. “One of the fixed rules of reading history is that to a considerable extent, you learn more about the time the book was written than you necessarily do about its subject,” he said.
Although McNally did not experience the 1960s counterculture up close, he held a fascination with the period and the many cultural changes it brought. Upon arriving at graduate school in the early ’70s, he quickly became bored with the typical graduate student’s routine of “learn this, regurgitate that and so forth.” He decided to choose his dissertation topic early, and because the ’60s were too recent, settled on the Beat Generation.
“What came to fascinate me about Kerouac … is that he did something incredibly noble,” said McNally. Having published his first novel to some critical success in 1951, Kerouac then set out to write something he believed would never be published. Those writings would later become his seminal 1957 novel “On the Road.”
That novel, McNally said, caused an uproar in American culture because it represented a growing challenge to the status quo. “The status quo social life of America in 1957 was fixed and as rigid and as boring as really any time in American history,” McNally observed. Massive disruptions of the previous decades, including the Great Depression and World War II, had led Americans to treasure this stability.
Juvenile delinquency, McNally argued, was a significant concern for many Americans, and the popularity of “On the Road” only exacerbated those fears. The book subsequently became popular with many influential figures of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia.
Funnily enough, none of this may have happened had the famously grumpy New York Times book reviewer Orville Prescott not been on vacation when “On the Road” was published. A writer named Gilbert Millstein was assigned to review the book, which he praised, giving Kerouac his first big boost into the limelight. “Sales took off and never stopped,” McNally recalled.
“’On the Road’ also brought fame and notoriety to the so-called ‘beat generation,'” McNally continued, “which shunned the conformism that dominated so much of American culture at the time. [Kerouac] saw that, and I would argue that it was a demand for a spiritual regeneration of what had become a very boring and conformist and utterly consumer-addicted country.”
Critics of Kerouac mistook this message for a call to violence, which McNally remarked “says more about the critics than it does about Kerouac.”
Following the talk, McNally took questions from the audience, discussing such topics as the beat movement’s influence on the San Francisco counterculture and his thoughts on the future generation of writers.
Tags: Featured Story Photo, Harker Speaker SeriesHarker dance students Karina Chen, grade 7, and Chloe Chen, grade 8, recently competed at the Hollywood Connection dance competition in Santa Clara, where they won a first place gold medal for lyrical dance in the 11-13 age group. Karina also earned the chance to receive a Hollywood makeover, while Chloe was put in the running for a special studio scholarship for a week of unlimited classes at the Millennium Dance Complex.
Both students are enrolled in Harker’s middle school dance program as members of the grades 7-8 girls dance group Showstoppers, and Karina was previously a member of Dance Fusion, the coed dance group for grades 4-6.
Congratulations to these two young talents!
Tags: Featured Story Photo, Performing ArtsMay 17, 2016
Jonathan Ma received a First Award of $1,500 from the American Statistical Association at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in mid-May for his project, Genomics-Based Cancer Drug Response Prediction through the Adaptive Elastic Net.
Jan. 20, 2016:
Jonathan Ma was today named a finalist in this year’s Intel Science Talent Search. As one of 40 finalists selected from more than 1,750 initial entrants, Ma will travel to Washington, D.C. in March for the final stage of competition, where more than $1 million in prizes will be awarded.
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Four Harker seniors have been named semifinalists in the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search, the Society for Science announced Wednesday. The students and their projects are as follows:
Vineet Kosaraju: Rational RNA Riboswitch Design through a Massive Open Laboratory
Sophia Luo: Integrative Multi-Cohort Analysis of Preeclamptic Placenta Identifies Perturbation of the P53 Pathway, Similarity to Certain Cancer Subtypes and Clinically Relevant Drugs
Jonathan Ma: Genomics-Based Cancer Drug Response Prediction Through the Adaptive Elastic Net
Sadhika Malladi: Application of EMDomics to Identify Age-Associated Expression and Treatments in Cancer
More than 1,750 students from 512 high schools entered this year’s contest. Of those, 300 were selected as semifinalists and each received a $1,000 award. In addition, each student’s school also received $1,000. The 40 finalists, who will compete in Washington, D.C., will be announced on Jan. 20.
The San Jose Mercury News mentioned the four semifinalists and last year’s win by Harker grade Andrew Jin ’15 in their coverage of the contest.
Tags: Featured Story Photo, In the News, topacademic, topacademicsThanks to a recent lower school dress drive, the holiday season was made a little brighter for at-risk and underprivileged youth at the Starbird Youth Center in San Jose. The items collected became part of a larger donation of more than 500 gifts that were handed out to clients of the center.
“There were about seven bags of boys and girls party clothing donated,” recalled Tere Aceves, Harker’s director of event fundraising. Last month the lower school hosted a holiday cookie decorating event, at which parents were asked to bring in gently used children’s dress clothing for the drive. About 60 parents heeded the call for such items.
Harker parent Erin Vokey (Miles, grade 1) is the youth activities supervisor at the Starbird Youth Center and is in charge of the center’s day-to-day activities, as well as its literacy programs.
“We are an after-school program that works with at-risk and under-privileged youth. We help them by providing food, homework help and a safe place to go after school. We also do a program called The Good Choices, which is a basic moral guide that teaches them what are the right choices to make to lead a better life,” she said.
At the time of the dress drive, the center also had partnered with the Family Giving Tree to distribute gifts to clients and their families for its annual Christmas event, Vokey explained. “We set up a room where children picked out clothing from the holiday dress drive. This is the second year we have had the dresses there and it was a huge success. Fellow Harker parent Julie Carr (Aiden Harshman, grade 1) and her family volunteered to hand out all of the dresses to the youth in our community. It was an extremely heartwarming event,” recalled Vokey.
Another Harker parent, Stephanie Black (Chloe, grade 1), is the program director at the Starbird Youth Center. “Without her none of this would have been possible,” added Vokey.
Carr and her son (Aiden Harshman, grade 1) agreed that it was wonderful to see the joy in the kids’ faces when they got a beautiful dress, jacket or new shirt. “Stephanie, Erin and the entire staff at the center made it so easy for us to come in and volunteer. We are very grateful for the work they do and proud that we got to represent Harker’s philanthropy,” said Carr.
Carr noted that a fun, unexpected perk of being at the event was meeting the woman who does the voice of Bart Simpson, Nancy Cartwright, who was there to donate a pinball machine for the kids. “It was a Simpsons-themed machine and the kids loved it!” said Carr.
“There’s nothing more inspiring than seeing kids learn how to make good choices in life,” said Cartwright, noting that one of the reasons she wanted to achieve success in her own work was so she would have the means to help others.
Of his experience volunteering, Carr’s son, Aiden, reported that it was “really cool.” He said that there were lots of games to play with at the center and that he enjoyed seeing the kids get toys. “It made me feel good in my heart.”
Tags: Featured Story Photo, Lower School, OutreachGirls Basketball
The girls basketball team put up three huge wins last week as it defeated Mercy Burlingame, Crystal Springs Uplands and Pacific Collegiate School by an average margin of 40 points! Junior Jordan Thompson’s 28 points per game is still among the best in the CCS. The 13-3 girls team will travel to Immaculate Conception Academy on Wednesday.
Boys Basketball
After a tough league loss to Pinewood last week, the Harker boys team defeated Eastside Prep 64-53 on Thursday. Elijah Edgehill, grade 12, led the Eagles with 21 points. Cal-Hi Sports covered the game and you can see the highlights here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR_rKhcSWBk
The boys team plays tonight at Blackford at 7 p.m.
Boys Soccer
Last Monday, the boys varsity soccer team picked up its fourth win in a row as it defeated Crystal Springs Uplands 4-2. Omar Hamade, grade 12, had two goals, while Nick Acero and Sparsh Chauhan, both grade 10, each had one. Later in the week, the Eagles fell to Menlo 3-0. This Wednesday the team hosts Eastside Prep at 3 p.m. on Davis Field.
Girls Soccer
The girls Varsity soccer team dropped games to Sacred heart Prep and Castilleja last week. Lyndsey Mitchell, grade 11, scored the only goal for Harker. Come support the girls team as it takes on Notre Dame San Jose today on Davis Field at 3:30 p.m.
Wrestling
The Harker wrestling team traveled to Saratoga High last Thursday and, although they won five individual matches, the team lost 24-42. Kobe Howard, grade 9, and Davis Howard, grade 11, won by decision, and Diego Figueroa, grade 11, Anthony Contreras, grade 10, and Danny Reidenbach, grade 11, each won by fall. Later in the week at the Jim Root Tournament held at Prospect High, Davis Howard placed fifth in his weight class; he is currently ranked 19th in CCS in the 285-pound division.
MS Wrestling
Continuing his impressive run, Dezi Johnsen, grade 6, took home a first place trophy at the New Mexico National Wrestling Tournament in the 12-and-under, 130-pound division. Johnsen defeated wrestlers from New Mexico and Texas to earn the first place finish.
Tags: Featured Story Photo, Sports, topathleticsThe middle school Wildlife SOS club, made up of students in grades 6 and 7, painted watercolor cards and made origami toys during club time, then sold them to parents during the parent-teacher conference. The cards and toys sold out in under an hour, and the group raised about $77 for Wildlife SOS, an organization that rescues and cares for abused elephants and other animals. Club members are continuing to make the popular watercolor cards and also will be making origami spinning tops, which they plan to sell at the next parent-teacher conference in the spring. Go Wildlife SOS!
Tags: Featured Story Photo, Outreach