The upper school campus became an eveningland of lights, music and fun on Saturday night, as Harker held the 125th Anniversary Gala, its first gala since 2016. Held in the new athletic center and branching out to the Rothschild Performing Arts Center’s Patil Theater, more than 370 parents, alumni, faculty and staff were feted with custom videos, singing, live music, dancers, top-drawer food and drink, a hot band and great company.
Actor D.J. Blickenstaff ’09 and opera singer Gabrielle DeMers ’03 brought their special talents to their alma mater for the evening, along with a host of current student performers.
The gala, reformed and resurrected following the opening of the new athletic center (2017) and Rothschild Performing Arts Center (2018), was also the final major event in Harker’s 125th anniversary celebration. Suspended during construction, the event took place in the newest portion of the upper school campus, opening with the show in the Patil Theater at 6:30 p.m.
The Gala Show was emceed, and included a special performance, by Blickenstaff (“Dear White People,” “Colony” and “Catching a Break”). Segments highlighting aspects of Harker’s programs were enhanced by historical photos and related performances by the Harker Jazz Band, Varsity Dance Troupe, Cantilena, Dance Fusion and Downbeat.
DeMers, a professional opera singer, sang the tour de force aria “The Jewel Song” from Gounod’s “Faust.” The show’s finale brought back Blickenstaff and DeMers, and culminated in – for the first time ever – all of Harker’s vocal, dance and instrumental groups performing together, including the middle school’s Concert Choir; boys hip-hop group, Kinetic Krew; and Showstoppers, the grade 7-8 dance troupe. Head of School Brian Yager shared a few remarks and announced the launch of the school’s new 125th Gift Initiative.
Following the show, guests moved to the athletic center’s Zhang Gym, now deep in party trim, for cocktails and more entertainment, including an auction.
Master of Ceremonies Jeff Draper welcomed attendees and led them through some games. Hors d’oeuvres and drinks were available in a beautifully decorated area on the gym floor, where guests could bid on auction items and try to win jewelry and wine. The evening’s food was prepared by the outstanding Harker culinary staff lead by Chef Steve Martin.
During dinner, Draper introduced a tribute to the seniors, which included some recorded memories by students and a slide show of every member of the Class of 2019. The event really got swinging after dinner as the Cosmo Alleycats brought their special brand of music to the dance floor. Other features of the evening included a special 125th anniversary photo booth with cool props where guests could take selfies or have a portrait taken.
The whole extravaganza was made possible by many kind donors, including presenting sponsors Rao and Rohini Mulpuri, and Fermi Wang and Jean Aida Kung. Gold sponsors were Atiq Raza and Nandini Saraiya of Reveti Jewels Inc., and Bobby and Ann Johnson, as well as an anonymous donor. Gold group sponsorship included DJ and Devika Patil, Vik and Roma Ghai, Amrita and Sunit Mukherjee, Priya and Shiva Shivakumar, and Suneela Muddu and Muddu Sudhakar.
Silver sponsors were Neeraj and Anisha Gupta; Nikki Lin and Brian Duff; and Yoko, leok SiTou and Tony Lau. Bronze sponsors were Ganesh and Sunitha Krishna, Robert Lee & Associates LLP, Devcon Construction Inc., and Vivek Thoppay, managing director at Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc.
This article was originally published in the spring 2013 Harker Quarterly.
With information literacy and research skills becoming increasingly important to college-bound high school students, the history and library departments have spent the last several years developing a comprehensive research and writing program to give Harker students an edge in creating scholarly works at the college level.
A work in progress since it began as a collaboration between Susan Smith, library director, and Donna Gilbert, history department chair, in 2006, the program has since grown into a cornerstone of Harker’s history instruction. “It’s become a normative part of every history course at The Harker School, and we’ve carefully scaffolded it and planned it so that the skills build over time, and kids are constantly reinforcing and practicing and mastering and then moving on,” Gilbert said.
The initiative was spurred in part by a feeling that too much emphasis was being placed on multimedia presentations and not enough on strong writing skills – “that PowerPoints and iMovies had started to replace traditional writing,” Gilbert said.
“The reality is that our kids need to go to college and they all need to write really well,” said Smith. History proved to be a great place to begin building this foundation because of its emphasis on studying primary sources, critical thinking and developing thesis-based arguments.
“We try to get them excited about primary sources and looking at the photos of people or artifacts of an era,” said Smith. “But then understanding how to analyze, evaluate and put together a cohesive, thesis-driven argument about something is what’s more important.”
History teachers work with the library department to come up with topics each year that the students at each grade level can choose for their research papers. Key criteria include the types of research required, the amount of researchable information that is readily available and whether the topics have been covered in class.
In grade 9, world history students are assigned a compare-and-contrast research paper on an ancient history topic. During this process, students learn the basics of using databases, creating note cards, paraphrasing sources and writing a thesis. Sophomores deepen their knowledge of databases and begin analyzing more scholarly works, as well as learn to reinforce their theses and create more detailed note cards. “That’s an argumentative, thesis-driven essay where they’re defending one side or the other of an issue, and we give them a choice of lots of issues to pick from,” Smith said.
Grade 11 United States history students may find themselves creating different types of research papers, depending on if they are in an Advanced Placement or regular class. AP students will analyze a Supreme Court case, while regular U.S. history students choose a topic from the Civil War.
This year students were asked to analyze a Civil War-era photograph from the Library of Congress’ American Memories project and create a biography of a person about whom little was known. Doing so required deep research of the world around the person and thinking critically about how he or she would have lived at the time the photograph was taken.
“One of, I think, the most captivating things about the U.S. history project was that they couldn’t possibly have known anything about these obscure people that we found these photographs of,” Smith remarked. “They aren’t in history books. They don’t have Wikipedia articles.”
AP students are given a wide range Supreme Court cases to choose from for their papers. They each then develop a thesis on whether the decision made on the case came from a partisan or neutral interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.
Although teachers and librarians decide which topics are open to students to research, offering a wide variety of topics to choose from is an important part of the curriculum. “We always try to add choice,” Smith said. “That is something we’ve protected and the teachers are great about that.”
For instance, grade 9 World History students may be given a list of five questions to choose from, such as comparing burial rituals from two cultures. They will then be presented with a list of cultures that they can choose to compare. AP U.S. History students are given a list of 120 Supreme Court cases as options to analyze.
Once they have completed three years of historical research and analysis, seniors have the option of applying for a grant to embark on a yearlong independent research project via the John Near Endowment or The Mitra Family Endowment for the Humanities. For this endeavor, students can choose whatever topics they like. “They can move in a direction that really appeals to them intellectually. And we get complete buy-in, because they’ve now not just chosen to apply but they are sent off, really, with very few restrictions and just guidance,” Gilbert said.
Students typically begin the process by arriving with well-developed proposals. “Somewhere in their studies, they’ve decided that they really want to explore the gender identity issues of Frida Kahlo, or they really are interested in educational reform,” Smith said.
Mexican poet Frida Kahlo was a subject of particular fascination for 2012-13 Mitra Family Scholar Shivani Mitra, grade 12 (and daughter of the scholarship’s founders). She began her research by reading books about Kahlo’s life and works. She then got as close to the source as she could. “I took a monthlong trip to Mexico City during the summer, where I was able to use primary source material – letters, diary pages – for my research,” she said.
“I visited her house in Coyoacán multiple times, met her grandnephew and niece, interviewed the curator of her museum, and visited countless museums in the city that had her works. By the end of the summer, I had gathered enough material from which I could start formulating my thesis.”
Mitra found that undertaking this project allowed her to foster her intellectual curiosity, and that learning so much about a person she respects and admires was the most satisfying part. “I enjoyed traveling to Mexico City and discovering Frida for myself, the most. She is a fascinating person, and the more I got to know her, the more I respected her,” she said. “Pursuing an academic passion of mine outside of a classroom, in a different country, by myself, was an amazing experience that I will never forget.”
Ashvin Swaminathan, grade 12, a recipient of a 2012-13 Near Scholar grant, combined his love of music and history for his project. “History is not just a collection of facts, and the patterns and connections between events and people are what make history fascinating to me. I also love classical music, and I play the violin for the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra,” he said. Swaminathan chose to focus on the development of American classical music, with a special focus on the works of Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. “I researched the lives and contributions of these two composers by reading several books from the Harker and local public libraries. I also studied numerous scholarly journal articles about these composers from the Harker library databases,” he said.
Swaminathan found that the two composers left their impressions on one another in several ways, and each had used the plight of Hispanic people as a theme in a major work. “Copland wrote his ‘El Salon Mexico,’ a piece that celebrates Mexico, in 1936 at about the time when the Mexican Repatriation was going on,” he observed. “Interestingly, Bernstein wrote his ‘West Side Story,’ a musical about the Puerto Rican gang wars in New York City, in 1957 when the Puerto Rican immigration to mainland U.S. was at its peak.”
Though Bernstein was candid about his politics, finding information about Copland’s political views proved difficult, so Swaminathan contacted several music scholars, including San Francisco Symphony musicologist Susan Key and the University of Houston’s Howard Pollack, a noted expert on Copland.
Both students found that their research practices have helped them develop skills beyond those required for historical analysis. “The ability to perform thorough analysis and uncover hidden patterns was the most valuable skill I have developed through this research,” said Swaminathan, who added that he also developed the skill “to analyze historical events and thereby extract plausible reasons behind them as well as connections between them. This abstract ability to analyze events and arguments manifests itself in every subject from English to mathematics.”
Similarly, Mitra discovered that her newfound research skills have helped her in writing papers for other classes. “For example, this semester I have a psychology and an English research paper. Finding the right sources comes much easier to me now,” she said.
The program continues to develop thanks to constant collaboration and feedback from teachers who frequently meet to discuss methodology and share their ideas, something that has been an important part of the program since its inception.
“It’s been a five- or six-year journey,” said Gilbert. “We used department meetings for two or three years, with the librarians always there in a kind of collaborative discussion about what’s working and what’s not working.”
This practice continues today, with teachers still learning from one another in brainstorming sessions at department meetings. “We get the best of everybody’s ideas. And they don’t even get that what they’re doing is brilliant,” Smith said. Over time, this sharing of ideas has resulted in a series of best practices that teachers can draw on. “And that’s the nature of teaching,” Smith said. “You go in there, you close the door, you do brilliant things every day and most of the time, nobody knows.”
Felix Wu, grade 10, is among the top 10 finalists in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library’s Profiles in Courage Essay Contest. The essay, which profiles Dennis Kucinich, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, was one of 8,000 submitted for the contest. After four rounds of judging, during which it was reportedly reviewed by a number of U.S. senators, it was declared one of the 10 best. Wu will be awarded $500 and a signed copy of Caroline Kennedy’s book, “Profiles in Courage,” for reaching this stage of the contest. The judge who informed Wu of his achievement recommended that he send the essay to Kucinich, which he has plans to do.
Author Alexandra Zapruder, who penned “Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust,” visited Harker on Feb. 8 to speak to students about the subject of her book and why primary accounts are important to historical analysis. Harker journalism students captured the whole story.
Sarah Howells ’12, now a freshman at Princeton University, recently won first place in the Churchill Research Paper Competition sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s Churchill Center. “The history department is delighted to congratulate Sarah on winning first prize in the Churchill Research Paper competition,” said Harker history department chair Donna Gilbert.
Howells is the contest’s first winner, and it’s not the only first that she has earned for the paper, titled “Winston Churchill’s Efforts to Unify Britain from 1940-1941.” It was also Howells’ submission to earn a grant from the Mitra Family Endowment, which was established last year by Harker parents Samir and Sundari Mitra (Shivani, grade 11). Howells went on to become the first Mitra Scholar for her entry.
“I was pretty surprised, since this being the first year of the competition I was not sure what the expectations were,” Howells said. “I would like to thank the Mitra family for supporting humanities research at Harker, Ms. [Donna] Gilbert, Dr. [Ruth] Meyer and Ms. [Susan] Smith for helping me with research and making the Harker history department a strong supporter of independent work, and Ms. [Julie] Wheeler for convincing me to apply for the grant in the first place.”
Harker’s library director and resident history buff Sue Smith had a very pleasant surprise over the summer: a visit from the grandson of Frank Cramer, the founder of Manzanita Hall, the school that eventually became The Harker School. Tom Lasley and his wife, Jayne, live in Southern California, but made a trip up to the Bay Area to show their own grandchildren some of their family’s old haunts.
Smith and Office of Communication staffer Catherine Snider showed the Lasley family around the campus on a peaceful Saturday afternoon, being sure to stop at the history wall in the main building and the current Manzanita Hall, named, of course, in homage to Cramer’s original institution. It was Manzanita Hall that became Palo Alto Military Academy, which in turn merged with Miss Harker’s School for Girls to become Harker Academy and later The Harker School.
Details of Cramer’s life have been hard to come by, so Smith and Lasley had a very pleasant hour catching each other up on photos, old documents and stories. “I feel like we’ve filled in some big gaps in our knowledge of our school’s founder,” said Smith, “and we’ve made plans to continue to share documents and information. It was such a wonderful surprise to meet Frank Cramer’s descendant!”
This article was originally published in the summer 2012 Harker Quarterly.
Two long-term plans clasped hands this spring when Harker became top bidder on a desirable property near Union Avenue and Highway 85 in San Jose and decided to open a preschool there, initially. The purchase process, though not completed, is in full swing and the full transition will take several years.
“While we prepare to transition from Blackford,” said Chris Nikoloff, head of school, “Harker will open a preschool on Union. Not only will this accomplish some strategic objectives for the school, it will make productive use of the Union campus,” he said, noting that a preschool summer program is slated to open in June 2013, with the annual program to follow in September. The preschool will serve ages 3 through (young) 5-year-olds and aims to open to 48 students, with the capacity to grow up to 120 students.
For the next several months, Harker is doing its due diligence on the Union campus reviewing needed permits, traffic issues, environmental questions and the title. If all goes well, the administration could close on the property around the end of 2012 or beginning of 2013.
The Preschool
Harker had been studying the preschool market for about two years — long before the Union property arrived on the scene — most recently during its recent accreditation process. Previously, the school ran a very successful junior kindergarten, but closed that program (as well as the school’s boarding program) to make space for the upper school. According to Nikoloff, many independent K-12 schools have a preschool, and the Harker administration continually hears from kindergarten families about the limited availability of quality preschool programs. A preschool would effectively allow Harker to provide another important enrollment window in the primary grades, extend its mission to an additional age group, and respond to a growing need for a quality preschool in Silicon Valley, especially with the state of California rolling back the eligibility age for kindergarten. The
preschool plan took on new impetus as the Union acquisition plan matured.
Union Avenue – The Third Campus
Ever since opening the upper school in 1998, Harker has planned to own three campuses. Currently Harker owns the upper Saratoga and lower Bucknall campuses, but holds a lease on the middle school Blackford campus until 2025. However, the Blackford lease has long been viewed as a stop-gap measure.
“Our long-term plan is to locate the middle school on the Bucknall campus and move the lower school to the Union campus. Bucknall’s facilities – such as the fields, pool and gym – meet middle school and high school specifications, while the Union campus facilities are much more appropriate for K-5 students,” said Nikoloff, adding that there are four key needs to address before transitioning from the Blackford campus lease into its final Harker-owned campuses plan.
The four key needs prior to completing the middle- and lower school transitions are building a gym and theater complex on the Saratoga campus to replace the gym and theater on the Blackford campus; creating a permanent solution for field use; making improvements on the Union campus in preparation for its K-5 use; and relocating some operations at Blackford.
And, while the preschool would initially operate on the Union property, it would later be transitioned to leased or purchased land when the time comes to move the K-5 programs to Union. Kelly Espinosa, Harker’s summer school director, has been charged with administering the preschool. A veteran Harker employee, Espinosa holds a bachelor’s degree in child development from San Jose State, and has many years’ experience directing Harker’s summer school, after-school recreation programs, and the Harker Family & Alumni Picnic.
Noted author and historian Vicki León visited the upper school campus in late March to speak to Ruth Meyer’s world history class and participate in a class activity that involved discussing artifacts uncovered from various civilizations. Harker’s journalism students captured the full story and posted it on Talonwp.com.
Grade 3 history students spent a Friday in early February dressed up as historical figures for the yearly Dress for History Day. Students as well as teachers arrived dressed as historical versions of cowboys, miners, Native Americans and more.
Cyrus Merrill’s grade 8 history students had the unique opportunity to chat with White House speechwriter Laura Dean in late January, just after President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address.
The interviews were conducted by phone, and students asked a range of questions about speechwriting and what life is like as an employee of the president. Dean said that Obama practices the speech only “two or three” times without interruption from applause, and that speechwriters attempt to strike a balance between content that will be liked both by Congress and the general public.
During the process, she said, writers often spend a lot of time debating which ideas to start with, and find that it is difficult to say “no” to the president when he has an idea for the content of a speech.
Writing of the State of the Union speech starts in December, and begins with research teams finding out what they want the speech to cover and checking facts with specialists. During the last couple of weeks before the address, the president becomes more involved in the process, but during the final week, the team tries to keep him from making any further changes.
Amusingly, some students wanted to know what font is used when writing the speeches. “Times New Roman 12,” Dean replied.