Upper school Latin students scored big on national Latin and Greek exams, which were taken in March. In all, students won 24 gold medals, 13 silver medals, 12 magna cum laude certificates and six cum laude certificates.
In Latin I, Cobi Ashkenazi, Gr.9, won a gold medal, with silver medals going to fellow freshmen Apurva Tandon, Andrew Luo and Christopher Sund. Rising senior Karen Wong won a cum laude certificate.
Gold medals in Latin II were won by Eric Henshall, Gr. 10, and Simon Orr, Gr. 9, while Ram Menon, Gr. 9, and Samantha Walker, Gr. 10, earned silver. Matthew Carpenter and Nathan Hoffman, both Gr. 10, won magna cum laude, and Gr. 9 students Piyush Prasad and Robert Deng won cum laude.
Freshmen Sean Fernandes and Rahul Desirazu won gold medals in Latin III, where Eric Zhang, Molly Wolfe and Katherine Woodruff, all Gr. 9, earned silver medals. Magna cum laude winners in this category were Nisha Bhikha and Ravi Tadinada, both Gr. 9, Gerard Glasauer, Gr. 10, and recent graduate Lauren Guerra.
Harker took more gold medals in Latin III Honors Prose than in any other category, with Gr. 9 students Ashvin Swaminathan, Jonathan Cho, Nik Datuashvili, Pranav Sharma, Michael Cheng, Richard Fan, Shannon Su and Saloni Gupta, Gr. 11, all earning top honors. Suchita Nety and Anuj Sharma, Gr. 9, took home the silver, and Vivian Li, Gr. 10, earned a cum laude certificate.
In Latin IV Prose, Robert Maxton, Gr. 10, won gold, and fellow sophomores Ila Dwivedi and Christophe Pellissier both won magna cum laude awards.
Ramya Rangan, Gr. 10, was a big winner in Latin IV Poetry, earning a gold medal and a Perfect Paper award. Other gold medal winners in this category were sophomores Alex Hsu, Ananth Subramaniam and Jessica Lin, and rising seniors Justine Liu and April Luo. Earning silver medals were Max Lan, Gr. 11, and Prag Batra, Gr. 10. Jason Kuan, Christine Hsu, both Gr. 10, and Supraja Swamy, Gr. 11, won magna cum laude certificates and Philip Oung, Gr. 10, won cum laude.
Graduate Anjali Menon won a gold medal in Latin V, while Alex Han, also Class of 2010, took silver and Colby Rapson, another recent graduate, won cum laude.
Recent graduate Brandon Araki was one point shy of having a perfect paper but still won the gold in Latin VI, as did fellow grads Sohini Khan and Maggie Woods.
In the national Greek exam, Menon earned a blue ribbon in the Greek Prose category, the highest honor, and missed earning a perfect paper by a single point. Menon also earned a red ribbon award in Greek Tragedy, missing another perfect paper by three points.
Albert Chu, Gr. 8, was one of eight California winners in the Promising Young Writers Program, which recognizes talent and emphasizes the importance of writing skills. Initially, 12 eighth-grade students submitted a theme piece of writing as well as writing samples. Harker nominated Chu and classmate Anika Ayyar to represent the school in the competition. Chu’s work was judged on content, purpose, audience, tone, word choice, organization, development and style. He earned a Certificate of Recognition for Superior Performance in Writing, and Ayyar received a Certificate of Participation.
Patrick Campbell, Gr. 12, was named the 2010 River of Words Environmental Poetry and Art Contest Bioregion Prize Winner for a poem he wrote about watersheds titled “Old Country.” River of Words is a California-based, nonprofit organization that seeks to encourage connections between creative young people and their natural environment.
According to their website, award-winning artwork and poetry “is exhibited around the globe and is seen by millions of people each year, both in person, and reprinted in magazines, books, annual reports and other media.” Campbell wrote his poem while a student in Jennifer Siraganian’s Creative Writing class last fall. Campbell accepted his award at a ceremony on April 17 at the San Francisco Public Library.
“The award ceremony was lovely,” reported Siraganian, who added that Pamela Michael, River of Words executive director and co-founder, described Campbell’s poem as the strongest from the thousands of entries received from Bay Area students. In addition to enjoying publication in the River of Words annual anthology, Campbell has been invited to the national awards ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., in June.
Nine Harker students traveled to Washington, D.C., in early April for the 2010 National Japan Bowl competition. All three Harker teams made the final round, ultimately placing first in Level II, second in Level III and second in Level IV.
Japan Bowl is an academic competition that tests the achievements of high school students studying Japanese in the United States. The competition tests not only the students’ language skills but also their knowledge of proverbs and onomatopoeic (words that represent sounds, like “buzz” and “hiss”) expressions as well as various cultural elements.
Each year, the competition tests different non-language questions, and this year’s non-language questions included extensive topics such as the history of the showa and heisei periods, haiku, folk tales, demography, transportation, communications infrastructure and mass media, economy, business, Japanese artifacts, anime and manga and more.
Teams were:
Level II: Shilpa Nataraj, team captain, Gr. 10; Crystal Chen, Gr. 10; and Meera Madhavan, Gr. 9.
Level III; Tiffany Jang, team captain, Gr. 10; Victoria Liang Gr.11; and Lorraine Wong, Gr. 9.
Level IV: Kelly Chen, team captain, Gr. 12; Katie Liang, Gr. 11, and Jerry Sun, Gr. 11.
Olivia Zhu, Gr. 11, has been named one of the top 10 national finalists in the First Freedom Student Competition and will receive an honorable mention. More than 2,200 high school students competed nationwide.
The First Freedom Student Competition offers monetary awards for student efforts on history, current events and the right to freedom of religion. The competition is hosted by the First Freedom Center, an organization that provides programs to increase understanding and respect for religious freedom.
For the competition, students write an essay on religious freedom which is judged by historians, historical site and museum professionals, retired educators and business executives. The semifinalists’ essays are judged by constitutional law and religious freedom scholars to determine the top 10 essays and final judging is by experts in the fields of higher education and law.
The competition is held annually and is open to students in the United States, U.S. territories and to American schools and American home-schooled students worldwide.
Emily Wang, Gr. 9, received a gold medal for her outstanding writing through The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, an 87-year-old national program that recognizes outstanding creative teenagers and offers scholarship opportunities for graduating high school seniors.
She will be honored June 9, 2010, at a gala celebration at Carnegie Hall in New York City and may have her writing exhibited in Manhattan at the World Financial Center Courtyard Gallery June 9-25.
Wang joins some well-known figures in winning this award, including Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Redford, Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, John Lithgow and Bernard Malamud. Almost 900 students from 298 schools across California submitted 2,051 pieces of writing for judging including essays, poems, articles, stories and dramatic scripts. Of California’s 160 student winners, 22 were awarded Gold Keys, the highest award, and of those, six were awarded national Gold Medals. Wang is one of the six gold medalists.
The California Writing Awards are sponsored and organized by the California Writing Project (CWP), a network of 17 university-based projects across California, and California Writes, CWP’s outreach arm to families and communities.
Since the program was founded in 1923, more than 13 million talented junior high and high school youth (grades 7-12) have participated in The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and 9 million have been recognized and shared in $25 million in cash awards and college scholarships. In addition to awarding annual scholarships to top portfolio award recipients, the Alliance collaborates with colleges across the country that make an additional $3.9 million in financial aid available to national award recipients.
The Winged Post and the online Web site, talonwp.com, have won a Crown Award from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association (CSPA) for its excellence in writing, coverage and content. The Crown Award, the highest recognition given annually by the CSPA, recognizes student print or online media for overall excellence and only 11 schools nationwide received Gold Crown awards for their Web sites. In addition, the Winged Post student newspaper received a Silver Crown for its efforts. Journalism teacher and advisor to the two publications, Chris Daren, traveled to New York with a group of students from the publication staffs to receive the awards at Columbia University.
With guidance and support from Daren, journalism students in both yearbook and newspaper have had opportunities to cover not only schoolwide events, but also interview celebrities and attend performance premieres. In early January, reporters talked to actor Harrison Ford, Senator Diane Feinstein, Mayor Gavin Newsom and figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi at the San Francisco premiere of “Extraordinary Measures,” and Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried as they promoted their new movie, “Dear John.” In February, the Winged Post spent an afternoon with the cast of “Ovo,” the new Cirque de Soleil touring show, and reviewed the group’s San Jose premiere the following day.
Both Talon and the Winged Post have received a number of silver and gold medal awards from CSPA’s annual critique. Additionally, the Winged Post received the National Scholastic Press Associations Pacemaker award for excellence in 2008.
Latin student Helena Huang, Gr. 8, was announced the winner of last year’s Ancient Coins for Education (ACE) fall essay contest. Every year Gr. 8 Latin students participate in the ACE program, the goal of which is to encourage learning about the classical world through the use of primary sources. This is achieved not only by providing ancient coins for the students to identify but through essay contests held throughout the year. Huang wrote her essay on the Roman emperor Gallienus, and she noted she is fascinated by “the historical [and] cultural information you can obtain from the designs and inscriptions on each side [of the coins].” As recognition for her achievement, Huang recently received both a coin and a certificate.
On Jan. 25, Emily Wang, Gr. 9, was presented with an Outstanding Art Award for the piece she submitted, titled “Reaching Out,” to the middle school publication “enlight’ning.” The magazine, published every spring, showcases artwork, poetry and prose created entirely by middle school students. The drawing was composed and submitted to the magazine while Wang was attending the middle school in Gr. 8.
The magazine itself was awarded a Gold Medal Certificate by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, scoring 979 out of 1,000 points. During the 2008-09 school year, “enlight’ning” received the CSPA’s Gold Medalist Certificate and Gold Crown awards.
A book review by Nikita Agrawal, Gr. 12, was published in the October issue of the nationally distributed Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA). A professional journal read by librarians serving teens in school and public libraries, VOYA boasts a readership of over 20,000. Agrawal worked closely with Lauri Vaughan, US librarian, who underwent an application process before she became a regular critic of professional, non-fiction and fiction titles for the journal two years ago. VOYAassigned Vaughan and Agrawal “The Deep” by Helen Dunmore and sent advanced copies of the title last June. Agrawal and Vaughan submitted their reviews, which they prepared independently, to editors shortly afterward. The reviews provide a short introduction and critical analysis as well as ratings for popularity and quality. Agrawal and Vaughan each gave favorable assessments to the book, the third in the popular “Ingo” series by the British author. An avid reader and member of the US Reading Club, Agrawal follows in the footsteps of alum Denzil Sikka ’09, who was also published in VOYA. The book and the review are currently on display in the upper school library.