The Harker Speaker Series is proud to announce that astronaut Gregory Errol Chamitoff, Ph.D., will be the first speaker for the 2011-12 season, appearing at 7 p.m. at Nichols Hall on the Saratoga campus on Sept. 26. A Montreal native, Chamitoff attended Blackford High School in San Jose, graduated with a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from California Polytechnic State University and has received advanced degrees in multiple engineering disciplines from California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Houston Clear Lake.
His experience with NASA began in 1985, working on several NASA projects during his stint at MIT, including stability analysis for deployment of the Hubble space telescope, upgrades for the space shuttle’s autopilot function and more. In 1995, when he joined the mission operations team at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Chamitoff led the development of software applications, one of which is the 3-D displays of the International Space Station (ISS) and the space shuttle, which are used by mission control.
After being selected as an astronaut candidate in 1998, Chamitoff spent nine days living and working in the Aquarius undersea laboratory located at the Florida Keys in 2002. His first mission in space was in 2008, serving as the flight engineer and science officer aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for six months. In 2011, he was a crew member on the last flight of the Space Shuttle “Endeavour,” as a mission specialist conducting operations with robotic arms, helping to install a pallet of spare equipment and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a particle physics observatory that, as his resume states, could one day lead to breakthroughs on human understanding of the universe. In addition, during one of two spacewalks, he helped complete assembly of the ISS and also performed the final spacewalk of the space shuttle program.
The many honors Chamitoff has won over his career include the NASA distinguished service medal, NASA space flight medals, induction into the California Astronaut Hall of Fame and the Technical Excellence Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
The Common Ground speaker program kicks off this year with Paul Stoltz, Ph.D., speaking on resilience and optimism; he will be appearing at Harker on Tues., Oct.4 a 7 p.m. in the Nichols Hall atrium on the upper school campus at 500 Saratoga Ave., San Jose. Stoltz is founder and CEO of the PEAK Learning research and consulting firm and one of the nation’s top experts on human resilience. He created the AQ (Adversity Quotient) Method of measuring and fostering resilience, which is currently used by many Fortune 500 companies and leading business schools. In this back-to-school special, Stoltz explores how families may apply AQ techniques to encourage positive mindsets that promote greater learning, optimism, resilience and happiness. Stoltz’ best-selling books include “Put Your Mindset to Work” and “The Adversity Advantage: Turning Everyday Struggles into Everyday Greatness.”
Parents of students enrolled in Common Ground member schools may attend free of charge. Non-members may attend for a $20 admission fee.
Common Ground is a coalition of Bay Area schools that organizes events featuring experts in various fields to enhance parent education. Hosting of these events is rotated among the various schools throughout the year.
Dr. Paul Stoltz’ appearance schedule:
Tues., Oct. 4, 9 a.m.
The Nueva School
6565 Skyline Boulevard
Hillsborough
Tues., Oct. 4, 7 p.m.
The Harker Upper School
500 Saratoga Avenue
San Jose
Wed., Oct. 5, 7 p.m.
The Priory
302 Portola Road
Portola Valley
On March 12, the Harker Speakers Series brought revered photojournalist Rick Smolan to Nichols Hall to discuss the increasing scarcity of clean drinking water around the world. His work as a photojournalist has appeared in publications such as Time and National Geographic , and he created the A Day in the Life series of photobooks.
Smolan was “completely stunned at how interesting and troubling and in some ways inspiring the water problem is.” The difficulty, Smolan found, was world wide. “It isn’t a problem; it’s a whole series of interrelated problems, and depending on where you are in the world, it’s a different problem.” Smolan then began working with Blue Planet Run, a water advocacy group, to create a photo book of the same name. The photojournalist and, now, writer, seeks to change the perception the clean water crisis was only affecting the populations of poorer countries. Humans are now consuming water four times more quickly than nature is able to replenish it, and “Blue Planet Run features photos from Africa, where villagers must travel long distances to obtain gallons of filthy water, to West Virginia, where one family must deal with tap water so contaminated it runs blood red. For the full story on this wonderful speaker’s visit to Harker, see the Harker Speaker Series page.
The new Harker Speaker Series kicked off with a bang March 7 with over 100 parents, students and faculty in attendance to hear the inaugural series presentation, “What Happens When E.T. Calls?” by Dr. Seth Shostak of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute.
Shostak presented a lively and very entertaining exploration about the scientific hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence – which is now into its fifth decade – and how a timely convergence of extremely powerful computers, sensitive arrays of radio telescopes, and sophisticated software positions us in a unique place in human history where success in the search may not be that far off.
Watch the next Harker News for a recap of the presentation, and for news of future speakers. We hope to see you at the next one!
“It’s OK to be busy, but not crazy busy!” said Dr. Edward (Ned) Hallowell, a leading expert in the study of human focus. Hallowell gave a riveting talk to an audience of about 300 on the topic, “Crazy Busy: Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap,” at Harker’s Nichols Hall as part of the Common Ground Speaker Series in late January.
A leading voice in American psychiatry, Hallowell had simple and practical strategies on how to handle a fast-paced life. He warned that living in a state of chronic brain overload increases toxic stress and can lead to an “F state” (frantic, frenzied, fluttered, forgetful and furious). Hallowell noted it is important to protect and preserve the “C state” (cool, calm, clear, consistent, curious and courteous). Based on brain psychology, when you enter the angry state, your brain becomes primitive. The greatest damage from being too busy is that it prevents people from setting their own temperatures, controlling their own lives, he added.
Hallowell addressed some of the key issues we face today: losing track of time while online; multitasking in today’s wired, Smartphone wielding culture which makes people feel busier than ever; parents fearing their children’s futures will be compromised if their children are not top-tier students, and thus spending large sums on tutoring; social disconnection and anonymity occurring when one doesn’t know neighbors but shares private information online.
Hallowell’s approach, rather than addressing task management, addresses how to focus and nurture our most valuable human assets: time, attention and mental energy. His strategies for handling the fast-paced life include knowing what matters most to you and performing a quantitative time analysis of daily activities to get rid of time leeches; spending time cultivating lilies (things that are worth it), but being wary of too many lilies (then they become leeches)!; spending time at the intersection of three spheres: what you are good at, what you enjoy doing and what adds value. Hallowell says curtail, delegate or eliminate the rest.
Hallowell concluded by saying personal connection predicts success and urged families to find ways to have fun together and create a positively connected environment. If you are busy doing what matters to you, then, busy is bliss!
The Harker School is a member of Common Ground, a coalition of Bay Area schools working together to provide parent education to their communities. The coalition provides opportunities for parents to learn from experts in the fields of education and parenting, to share ideas with other parents, and to support each other’s efforts to enrich our school communities. This report was provided courtesy of Vidya Lakshmi Chari.
Beloved ragtime pianist Bob Milne was the latest guest of the Harker Speaker Series on Jan. 28, performing for the upper school students, faculty and staff at a special morning assembly at the upper school campus gym. Recognized as a leading performer of ragtime and boogie-woogie music, Milne performs about 300 times per year and was hired by the Library of Congress to create reference recordings of famous ragtime songs.
With his piano situated directly in the center of the gym and the students encircling him, Milne told the story of ragtime both through song and through his own prose. He used the morning’s first piece, “Carrie’s Gone to Kansas City,” to illustrate the key aspect of ragtime, namely the way in which the notes of the melody fall in between the chords. Hearing such songs for the first time, classical pianists of the era described the sound as being in “ragged time,” and commented that the musicians playing it “weren’t very good,” Milne said.
Ragtime, he later told the audience, was born from the American folk tradition, largely based on Irish and Scottish reels and jigs. In turn, many ragtime songs were based on folk songs played on the guitar, mandolin and violin.
Throughout his set, Milne showed the musical evolution of ragtime, from the soft lilt of “Little Enough,” to the upbeat jaunt of “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider,” a piano roll produced by three pianists, leading Milne to comment how hard it was to reproduce by himself. He also included a great rendition of perhaps the most well-known ragtime piece of all time, Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” Milne was also kind enough to have the piano rotated periodically so that the entire audience could see his hands as they danced up and down the keyboard.
Milne, who learns and plays entirely by ear, related during one such break that he was eating breakfast at a restaurant one morning and grabbed a salt shaker without having to look at where it was located on the table. This instinctive knowledge of where things are and how to reach them, he explained, is how he is able to play so accurately the rags’ bouncing left hand chords without looking, and he told the students that they were just as capable of playing by ear as he was.
During a brief question-and-answer session following his performance, Milne said he formally began playing music by starting with the French horn, and was the second chair of the Rochester Philharmonic while still a teenager. He stated, however, that he had been playing the piano by ear since the age of four. He also claimed, astonishingly, that he had never practiced a day in his life, and that he has no plans to start.
“I put my fingers where I hear in my mind,” he said.
The Harker School, a member of the Common Ground coalition of schools, will host the next Common Ground Speaker Series event with special guest Edward “Ned” Hallowell, M.D., on Wed., Jan. 26, at 7 p.m. The event will take place in the Nichols Hall atrium at the upper school campus at 500 Saratoga Ave. in San Jose. In a presentation titled “Crazy Busy: Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap,” Hallowell will discuss the difference between “good” busy and “crazy” busy.
An expert on anxiety, relationships and attention deficit disorders, Hallowell is the founder and director of The Hallowell Centers for Cognitive and Emotional Health, located in Massachusetts. He has authored or co-authored more than 18 books, including “Crazy Busy,” “The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness,” and the national best-seller “Driven to Distraction.”
Parents of students enrolled in Common Ground member schools may attend free of charge. Non-members may attend for a $20 admission fee.
Common Ground is a coalition of Bay Area schools that organizes events featuring experts in various fields to enhance parent education. Hosting of these events is rotated among the various schools throughout the year.
The Nichols Hall auditorium was abuzz Fri., May 7, during the visit of the latest guest of the Harker Speaker Series, Matt Flannery, CEO of Kiva. A ground-breaking organization in the fight against international poverty, Kiva utilizes transactions known as micro-loans (loans of small amounts, typically $25 or more) to enable people in remote, impoverished areas to start their own businesses and have a chance at success.
A graduate of Stanford University and a former computer programmer for TiVo, Flannery shared the story of how he went from “helping people pause live TV” to helping poor people in far-flung countries become entrepreneurs and start new chapters in their lives. To date, the total value of all loans made via Kiva has surpassed $136 million, with a repayment rate of 98.57 percent.
When it comes to small loans, Flannery said, “people are better than banks. People are able to take on more risk than banks, so if you are able to aggregate thousands of people who lend 25 dollars each, they can diversify their funding across many different businesses and many different places.”
Those thousands of people are also more able than banks to absorb risk, which has the added benefit of lowering interest rates.
Flannery’s interest in micro-finance began while he was still working at TiVo in the early 2000s, when his then-fiancée, Jessica, took him to a talk by micro-finance guru Dr. Muhammad Yunus, who lent small amounts of money to the working poor in Bangladesh. The loans were paid back, defying the many predictions to the contrary.
Inspired, Matt and Jessica traveled to Africa, which he described as “a place full of entrepreneurs.” There, they encountered many people with great ideas who lacked the capital to realize their dreams. Upon returning to the United States, the two decided to try to generate a stock market in the remote area they had visited.
After generating a business plan, they took the idea to venture capitalists. When the couple were unable to explain how they could make the idea profitable, they were advised to try talking to charity organizations. But when they presented their concept to those groups, they were told, ironically enough, that it more closely resembled a business.
Moreover, due to security concerns and legal restrictions, the plan to send large amounts of money to remote areas was deemed too risky.
With no funding and the possibility of their new venture being illegal, Matt and Jessica decided to pursue the idea on their own as a hobby. “Instead of starting a company, we just did it through our own personal checking account,” Flannery said. After making contact with a pastor in Uganda named Moses, they decided to have him take pictures of the people receiving their loans and post updates on their progress at an Internet café.
The loans went to such people as a goat herder, a restaurateur and a fruit stand owner. Flannery built a software system to invest in the businesses they helped start, and encouraged his friends and family to buy shares.
“It’s probably the best donation you’ll ever make, because maybe you’ll get it back,” Flannery told them. “But it’s probably the worst investment you’ll ever make because there’s no chance of making money here, and you’ll probably lose some of it.”
The investments worked, however, and the loans were eventually paid back. Flannery recalled having conversations with his friends about reading the online updates on the businesses they funded. “We’re really on to something,” he remembered telling himself, “because I’ve turned my group of lazy friends into people that really care about something.”
In October 2005, Flannery left his job with TiVo to devote all of his time to the newly founded non-profit Kiva.
“The idea of person-to-person lending on the Internet was a new concept and we were at the very beginning of that,” he said.
When Dr. Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, interest in micro-finance reached new heights. Kiva was soon being covered by CNN, CNBC, the New York Times and the Oprah Winfrey Show. By 2007, funded primarily by donations, Kiva had lent more than $10 million.
Recently, the micro-finance world has been experimenting with sending loans via cellular phones, which helps alleviate labor costs. Currently, the process is much more manual, with loan officers going out into the field and setting up loans in person, resulting in more overhead. Kiva itself has begun lending more to students, a type of fund the group can take on because its capital is more flexible. That is necessary since student loans can take an especially long time to pay back. The organization has also recently funded more green ventures, such as loans for solar panels instead of kerosene lamps or charcoal stoves.
Before closing his talk and opening the floor for questions, Flannery explained that Kiva was able to grow in part because its founders pursued the idea not as a business but as something they loved to do.
“We kind of gave up on Kiva as a business idea, and started thinking about it as just something we love to do,” he said. “And because of that, I think we really enabled it to succeed and to grow, because we didn’t put pressure on it to be a career, or put pressure on it to be really successful.”
“They really are losing their minds!” said psychologist Dr. Laura Kastner about teenagers. The third speaker in the 2009-10 Common Ground Series, Kastner addressed a gathering of 200 parents at Harker’s Nichols Hall atrium Jan. 26.
A University of Washington professor and author of four books on adolescents, Kastner reminded parents that normal teenagers “slough off half the neural branches” in the thinking portion of their brains around age thirteen. The loss precedes a huge bloom of synapse growth over the next ten years, but leaves young adults temporarily dependent on their emotional brains. Hence reactive behavior, mood swings and outbursts.
Combining neuroscience and psychology, Kastner provided a road map for parents anxious to navigate the emotional landmines of adolescence. Fully-developed adults also have emotional centers in their brains – called the amygdala – but tend to rely more heavily on the thinking brain – the frontal cortex.
Parents aware of their teen’s physiological dependence on emotional response and careful avoidance of letting their own amygdalas take over will provide better guidance for their kids. Parents of teens, says Kastner, should “accept teen behavior as normal” and “get going with good parenting.”
Good teen parenting, said Kastner, includes thoughtful, empathic reaction to outbursts and incentivizing teen self-critique rather than falling victim to emotional spiral typical of adolescent anger.
The Harker Speaker Series kicked off its 2009-10 season in grand fashion with the appearance of travel author and television personality Rick Steves, who discussed his newest book, “Travel as a Political Act.” Having traveled to Europe regularly since his teens, Steves began his travel writing career in the 1980s with the publication of “Europe Through the Back Door.” He went on to author more than 40 books that specialize in traveling Europe cheaply and experiencing the less tourist-oriented aspects of European cultures. He now hosts the popular public television series “Rick Steves’ Europe” and organizes European tours for thousands of people each year, in addition to writing a syndicated newspaper column and hosting a weekly radio show. Steves spoke to a packed audience at the Saratoga gym, and was also seen via live video feed by audiences in Nichols Hall. The theme of his hour-long discussion was how Americans can use the experience of travel to improve their understanding of the world and its many different peoples. In so doing, they can help improve America’s relationship with the rest of the world. Learning about the key figures in a country’s history can teach us much about the culture and people, he said, citing El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero, an advocate for human rights who was assassinated for his outspoken stance. Steves compared him to the soldier Nathan Hale, who was captured and killed by the British during the Revolutionary War – understand the people’s heroes and you will understand their culture. He covered some of the key differences between Europeans and Americans, such as work habits. Europe, Steves said, is often criticized by Americans because its citizens make less money than those in the U.S. “The full story is not being told here,” Steves said. He pointed out that workers in Europe actually make roughly the same hourly wage while choosing to work less. “Europeans are adamant about not working themselves into an early grave,” Steves said, noting that he was very happy to be an American citizen and would much rather run his business at home than abroad. “Because I love my country and love this way of life, I believe it is good style and patriotic to bring home a few challenges to encourage my neighbors to get it a little better,” Steves said. “We can learn from other people.” Toward the end of his presentation, Steves talked about his recent trip to Iran, saying he wanted to humanize its people. He confessed that he was nervous about visiting the country at first, a fear that was quickly assuaged. While stuck in traffic in Iran’s capital city of Tehran, a man in the next car handed Steves’ driver a bouquet of flowers, saying, “Give this to the foreigner in your backseat and apologize for our traffic.” He also shared the story of an Iranian woman who implored Steves to “tell the truth” about her country’s people: That they were strong, united and didn’t want their children to be “raised like Britney Spears.” These attributes, Steves said, are common among Americans who worry about how culture affects their offspring. “Think about their counterparts here that are most quick to hate Iran,” Steves said. “They’re good people, motivated by fear and love.” Steves said that among young people there is an opportunity to learn more about the world outside their borders and understand it, rather than fear it. “There’s a lot of fear being used against us these days,” he said, “and I’ve learned the flipside of fear so often is understanding.” He closed his presentation with an anecdote about a whirling Dervish he observed in Turkey. Whirling Dervishes are Muslim worshippers known for their distinct method of praying, which involves a circular dance that the Dervish does as a form of meditation. The Dervish explained to Steves that when he prays, he places one foot down to represent his home and family, and the other foot circles around, to praise the wonder and variety of God’s creation. One hand is raised to receive God’s love and another is lowered to bring this love down to his creation. He then begins whirling and entering his trance-like state. Steves said that the Dervish’s reverence of home, family and the world around him made them “fundamentally the same, and if I can go home with that appreciation, and then employ that broadened perspective as a citizen of this great nation, that’s the most powerful and beautiful souvenir, and that’s making travel a political act.” Following the presentation, Steves spent a brief period taking questions from the audience and signed books for his fans. Students interviewed after the event enjoyed Steves’ well-articulated and balanced perspective. Vamsi Vemereddy, Gr. 11, found the presentation “very interesting. I learned lots of different things about Europe, like how they view us.” Fellow junior Priya Sahdev said, “It makes you want to travel a lot more than I expected. I didn’t really know who [Steves] was when I was going in there, but going out of there, I really enjoyed the whole talk and I learned a lot from it.” “It was really educational to learn to learn about all these different places,” said Puneet Sidhu, Gr. 11. “It kind of makes me want to visit these places now, and have the experience myself.” Launched in 2007, the Harker Speaker Series invites inspiring, visionary individuals from a wide variety of fields to share their stories and expertise with Harker parents, students and faculty, as well as individuals from the larger community. For more information, visit http://www.harker.org/page.cfm?p=1307.[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”static” fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://skylark.harker.org/hno/backups/wp-content/story-slideshows/Rick_Steves_October_29_2009/soundslider.swf” width=”500″ height=”400″ targetclass=”flashmovie”]
