Children Rock Band

An Asian children rock band electrify their audience with their guitar-playing skills and superb musical talents.

High Tech High

School: High Tech MiddleAuthor: Shani Higgins Subjects: ArtGrade Levels: 8th

How do we create values using only one color and black and white?
For their first project this semester, Shani Higgins’s eighth grade art students at High Tech Middle created “Larger than Life” Monochromatic Self-Portraits. They practiced by painting smaller monochromatic pieces inspired by Vassily Kandinsky’s abstract paintings. To start the process, Ms. Higgins took pictures of each student in the class. Students then used PhotoShop to alter images of their faces and used the altered images to create large drawings. Students projected their faces and traced the altered images from the wall. Working with acrylics, students chose their favorite color for the monochromatic study. Each face is at least 18 x 24”. They worked from light to dark, first painting the light areas and gradually adding small amounts of color and black. It was important that students paid close attention to line, value, and detail.In addition to the extenuated size, another unique aspect of this project is that the Art classes worked with the technology classes to make audio recordings of the artists talking about their work. We will have all of the work on display during Exhibition Night on March 23rd, 2006. Visitors will be able to sit down at computer stations, put headphones on, click on a web image of each student and listen to them talking about their work. As an audience, you be amazed at the kind of artwork these middle school students are capable of. Also on display during Exhibition Night will be sample work by every sixth and eighth grade student at HTM.

What Will Students Be Able To Do:

Alter images on PhotoShop. Paint image using acrylic paints and use a monochromatic color scheme for self-portrait.Recognize and create different values using one color and black and white. Talk about the process and reflect on their work.
What Will Students Know (content covered):

A Common Story

Albert Ai , 12th Grade
Santa Clara CA
Adrian C. Wilcox High School

In attempting to pinpoint the unifying source of poetry’s value, Perrine found that worth stemmed not from an imposition of the beautiful or distasteful, strange or common, joyful or poignant, but from the simple communication of human experience. Perhaps that is why my Asian American heritage can so powerfully color my outlook on life, but through no single identifiable path. Thinking about what my culture means to me conjures both the thrill of cultural celebration and the gravity of filial piety, both the bitterness of competition and the camaraderie of social harmony. Being a first generation Asian American raised at the center of Silicon Valley bridges me between the plenty of America’s most prosperous and the poverty of my parents’ rural origins.

But thinking about my heritage also brings forward the realization that my understanding of our family’s past is meager at best, simply because it was decided at some point that this story was too commonplace to be heard. I unavoidably pieced together a few details over the years: that my father had come to the United States without any assets or family to turn to, or even a strong grasp of English; that after earning two graduate degrees, he had first worked as a door to door salesman, selling copies of the Bible; that after his troupe had run out of gas, funds, and places to solicit, he had found work as an assistant chef making a dish called “cashew chicken” at a small restaurant in Missouri. How he had gotten there from Ohio, where he had earned his second degree, he never bothered to say. Only after moderate success at the restaurant was he able to save enough to come to California, buying an economical watch as a souvenir before he left.

After it was decided that this story, in completion, was too commonplace to be heard, I made the critical mistake of never protesting the decision until silence had become so firmly established that it became unlikely the complete story would ever be told. When I finally grew mature enough to understand why this was regrettable, I began to ask around, to hear the stories of others. To my surprise, their grasp of their own stories was as fragmented as mine: broken, vague, and distant. I listened as their voices dropped and they too admitted their meager knowledge about who and what preceded them. I then realized that my story, about the story that had never been told, was in fact an ordinary one. It was just one of thousands, belonging to thousands of other families respectively, whose unique stories had also been decided too commonplace to tell.

If I could change one thing to make the world a better place, I would have it that the stories of our past be heard. My father’s reticence has implicitly shown me that the wealth of unspoken meaning can only be discovered on our own, by our own desire. The necessity of such self-discovery may temporarily delay progress, but it is also by such discovery that whatever meaning we find becomes most deeply engrained into how we view the past, present, and future.

A few years ago, digging through an old drawer of odds and ends, I found that watch – the one my father had bought before leaving Missouri. It was missing its band, and had a crack over the third hour. Seeing this, he urged me to throw it away, but I didn’t. As a watch, I realized that it was worthless, and at best sentimental. But as a remnant of the past, it serves as a reminder of one struggle to overcome barriers of language and isolation, of poverty and opportunity; a relic of human experience, too valuable to be forgotten.

Save the Tamil (Children in Sri Lanka)

Omaelan Hariharan
Cupertino CA
Eaton Elementary School

My Pet

Darlene, portrayed by Bethel High School Senior Arielle Galleon, is bemoaning the loss of her beloved. A monologue from Roger Krashner performed in Vallejo CA.

Changing the Way We Think

Olivia Zhu, 10th Grade
Saratoga CA
The Harker School

There are so many aspects of the world that I wish were different, but I have the strongest personal interest in and connection to fixing the role of education in California and in other parts of the world. Improving the status quo will result in further gains, according to historian Henry Commager’s belief that “Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.” Unfortunately, scholastic spending is likely to continue decreasing due to the current financial crisis, and the Millennium Development Goals regarding worldwide schooling for the underprivileged will not be fulfilled. At a time where some students are denied classrooms, textbooks, and supplies, I feel lucky that my family prioritizes the benefits of education and that I live in a community where the Asian drive for knowledge meshes perfectly with the American appreciation of creativity. Ideally, I would change the mindset of the world to reflect these dual values, hopefully leading to greater rights and respect for everyone.

I first realized the importance of changing current education standards and spending when I began tutoring students from underperforming districts. As smart and as driven as they are, they are sometimes at a disadvantage. A boy named Gustavo told me that he stays at school until late at night to relearn material from his teacher simply because there are too many people in his class for him to receive individual attention. However, after only one hour of tutoring, he understood his lessons perfectly. Though teachers are working overtime without pay and students are doing as best they can, situations such as Gustavo’s persist. Against obstacles such as budget shortfalls, my tutoring does little to mitigate the problem, yet I am grateful for the few hours a week that allow me to help the middle school students and learn about society from them. They make much of their temporary classrooms, separated only by thin corkboard partitions, by covering those walls with cheerful art projects and eloquent essays about their dreams and desires. Gustavo, for example, wants to be a soccer player—but a smart one.

Tutoring is so different from what I experience at my own school, where parents urge their children to study harder, take advantage of all the extracurricular options, and prioritize academics. There, the dreaded Asian grading scale is well known and often cited: an A is just average and a D means disowned. Myths circulate in other schools that we swap “strict parent” stories among ourselves after classes and all of us are mindless, knowledge-absorbing robots. Such stereotypes are, of course, incorrect and exaggerated, but the importance of learning has always been stressed in Asian culture. While academic pressure might be present in some situations, I feel that respect and appreciation of education are what tie all the students of my school together, not whatever bonding we might achieve by telling fictional scary Asian parent stories.

Being Asian-American means I settle contentedly in the middle of two cultures; I am fortunate to experience the individuality and academic freedom that is a cornerstone of American liberty as well as the motivation to learn, understand, and analyze that my parents instilled in me. Having the best aspects of both worlds allowed me to comprehend exactly why education is and will be such a key topic in American and global affairs. The Chinese proverb that states “shí nián shù mù, bâi nián shù rén,” or, just as cryptically, “grow a tree for a ten years, but grow men for a hundred,” truly emphasizes the importance of education—if people are nurtured and taught when young, they will be content and prosperous always. It has been proven that countries with higher standards in schooling will be able to develop a stronger workforce, keep those trained individuals from leaving for other nations, and fortify their economies. There is nothing more worth investment than this cause.

Granted, it may be difficult to begin this switch in attitude toward education, but change has already begun. Officials like Margaret Rhee have reformed Washington D.C. schools, Japanese pediatricians have later office hours based on the schedules of students, and greater attention is being paid to the plight of the California scholastic spending in general. As Commager noted, such transformations of the status quo will only beget more change as individuals are inspired by education to do more. Furthermore, if we nurture these people and communities, they will become self-sufficient. Hopefully they will even grow for more than a hundred years! If everyone embraced the parallel ideals of dedication and distinctiveness, then this ideal future could occur. As a young generation of Asian-Americans who have benefitted from both Western and Eastern traditions, it is our duty to ensure that these very achievable goals are fulfilled.