During the days, the students will be divided into two age groups to take specially designed classes, from Harvard’s top professors—including a lectures by University President and economist Lawrence H. Summers, Bass Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel, IBM Professor of Business and Government Roger Porter, W.E.B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates Jr. and chemistry demonstrations from Nobel Laureate Dudley Herschbach.

John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures Maria Tatar, who teaches the popular Literature and Arts Core class “Fairy Tales and Children’s Literature”, says she plans to explore the notion of what it means to “grow up” in our culture by focusing on Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.

She says she is “delighted” to teach the Choir and “add an academic element to the visit.”

“I see this as a great chance for academic and artistic interactions,” Tatar said. “I hope that some of the classes will get the students excited about Harvard.”

These kinds of interactions, Megan and Turnbull say, mean that the visit will be more than just a performance.

“It’s exciting,” Turnbull says, “[Harvard is] up there and attainable to everyone—they need to know that.”

“I want to see how everything works. It will get me prepared for an early start [in the college process],” Banfield says.

Turnbull says he hopes that Harvard will learn valuable lessons from his boys as well.

“The perceptions people had of black children—what they could do and what they couldn’t do—are wrong,” Turnbull says. “We will not be categorized. That’s very important.”

He says his children face particularly great challenges.

“I don’t hold back the realities of what they have to do to prove themselves,” he says. “I want to prove that their ancestors on the floor of the Atlantic, the suffering their people went through was for all of that. They must succeed.”

—The Harlem Boys Choir will perform at Sanders Theatre on Feb. 4.