Category: Article

It was my second year teaching and I thought I had everything figured out. My seventh graders were doing great in their classes and I was imparting sage advice left and right during mentoring sessions. Nothing could slow me down. Nothing, that is, until parent-teacher conferences came around. As it turned out, over the course of the previous academic quarter, my advice had been less than satisfactory. Several parents approached me with fair criticisms and certainly knocked me down a few pegs. Pretty quickly I realized that I didn’t actually…

Dystopian films so often show us the tradeoffs we make as we rely more on technology. Joe Breslin reviews Gattaca as a well-wrought examination of humanity, equality, and technology.

Grammar and Latin teacher Rob Greving shares some perspective to help us prioritize cleaning and even get better at it.

Mark Grannis, logic and history teacher, muses about the individual decisions that affect team outcomes in the college bowl games we watch this time of year.

Adults can regain the joys of a child through re-engaging with the local, novelties, and living seasonally. From a basis of attaining this child-like joy, parents and educators can then help guide boys to appreciate the same.

Lower-school teacher and author Joe Breslin reviews the biopic of Venus and Serena Williams’s coach and father, Richard Williams.

What’s the point of spending a week in the woods? Put simply, it’s something worth doing, it makes us feel alive, and it taps into our inner humanity that is covered over by the grime of frontcountry comfort. But behind that sentence, a thousand thoughts may come to mind or, perhaps, one could be left more confused: after all, in what addled mind does waking from a dream of a cozy bed into a frigid night in a frozen sleeping bag, a thousand miles from nowhere, sound “worth doing”? Let’s…

Logic is a mandatory course for all freshmen at The Heights, and not all of them are happy about it. They all begin with at least some idea of what logic is, and many of them are skeptical that they could possibly need a course on the subject, complete with a longish textbook. Don’t we all know the difference between the logical and the illogical without studying it? Don’t we know logic almost instinctively?  As it happens, I think the analogy between human reason and animal instinct is a pretty…

The Heights and books go together. The works we require and suggest our boys to read range from antiquity to modernity, embrace fiction and nonfiction, and include history, biography, philosophy, and science. One genre, though, seems to be missing, especially in the upper school: humor. By this I mean books such as the works of P. G. Wodehouse, Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, or even a collection of columns by Dave Barry. I hesitate to put such books on the reading list because that would assuredly deter the…

Each year around this time, connoisseurs of the commencement speech enjoy a wealth of new material from prominent citizens all over the country. It’s evident from popular culture that I am not alone in my enthusiasm for the genre. I have long been aware, however, that commencement speeches are more popular among the generation that delivers them than they are among those who are commencing. I know this because in my twenties I used to say, without exaggeration, that I thought about the commencement address from my 1985 graduation from…