I once heard someone say there are at least three reasons to become a teacher: June, July, and August. This response, I suppose, is true, but not because the summer is a time for laziness; rather, it is because the summer offers an opportunity for recreation in the truest sense of that word. It is a time to be made anew and, by this, to live fully. Whether your summer has, up to this point, been full of life or full of languor, now is the time to begin again….
I worry a lot about the current state of free speech. It’s literally my job to worry about it, because I teach a class on the topic of free speech. But after reading through my students’ final exams, I’m feeling a lot better. If you’re also a worrier, maybe you’ll feel better if I share the good news. Three days before the exam, I gave the students the final essay question in advance, and it was nothing if not topical: In April 2022, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”)…
It seems to me that, culturally, we have a misconstrued understanding of the meaning of “victory”. We oscillate between two extremes. At one extreme, we have an obsession with “winning” as an end to be attained at all costs. Lie, cheat, steal; all fine in the pursuit of a championship or a title. At the other, we have the “everyone’s a winner” mentality with all of its various manifestations. Of course, both of these understandings of winning are false and are dangerous to mind, body, and soul, but they both…
Summer is on the horizon and the teachers at The Heights have a roundup of recommended summer reading to sharpen your tools and recharge your batteries.
What does freedom look like in The Heights Upper School? Having arrived early to the Easter Vigil, I found myself pondering this in a dark church. The thought occurred to me as I looked up through the darkness: the freest man in the world is pinned to that cross. What does that mean for us? What does it mean for our children and their education? While freedom defines The Heights, it manifests differently in each division of our beloved School. In the Lower School it’s especially obvious in its visible,…
Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers! And to you especially, mom; I know I wasn’t the easiest kid to raise. Today though, I would like to also praise someone who isn’t known for being appreciated: … the mother-in-law. My mother-in-law in particular is the reason I wanted to give a shout-out to you all… Elisa is a mother of four daughters and made her career as a teacher, and eventually became head of the high school at which she taught. And although she was never my teacher, she has…
Most of my teaching is, more or less, made up of repackaged lessons taught to me when I was a student at The Heights. This is especially true of lessons on character and virtue and other things of the sort; I think I learned enough about Roman history and poetic allegory in college to teach them well, but about temperance or magnanimity? Those are things I learned only at The Heights. In the Lower School, one of the ways we teach these sorts of virtues is by emphasizing that the…
Since Easter came later this year, my wife and I had already begun Spring Cleaning before break even arrived. By this time in the season, I’m sure we’ve all been switching to warm-weather clothes, figuring out what needs to be handed down and what thrown away, trimming bushes, cleaning up outdoor spaces, (re-)organizing garages, workshops, laundry rooms, or sheds. This annual tradition also gave me time and space outside of the classroom to think about my own teaching. We have about six weeks before summer hits. So I’m suggesting some…
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) plunged into World War I, the Greco-Turkish War, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II with the confidence of a skilled matador twirling his cape over a furious 1200-pound bull. He was a journalist in all but The Great War, in which he was an ambulance driver who sustained serious injuries at the front. Survival was thrilling (so were the drinks afterwards), and then he got to write about its gory, mud-flecked glory. Well, mostly the mud and the gore. Glory wasn’t really Hemingway’s thing. As…
I recently listened to a podcast from a Mathematician named Marcus du Sautoy in which he talks about how, although we hear so often growing up not to take shortcuts, we should indeed take many shortcuts, and we do it all the time. And he has a point. Although I could multiply 456.76 and 341.08 by hand, it is much easier to do with a calculator, and if there is one nearby, I will always grab it. So, why is it so often taught at home and school to not…