Category: Article

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…

Like a siren, the sounds of summer are beckoning the boys to the lazy delights of vacation mingled with trips to the beach, the mountains, and for the lucky ones, expeditions across the sea. Dreams of sleeping in, no homework, and unlimited “free-time” dance in their heads, while parents begin to worry that soon enough there will be bored boys on-hand pinching younger sisters and instigating fights over the last fistful of Fruit Loops. But fear not! Below I share a highly idealized eight-step action plan that will hopefully assist…

One of the really charming things about adolescents is their ability to be playful about serious things while still taking them seriously. I saw this in mid-October as I was trying to give my students some context for the dueling rebel and loyalist pamphlets we were reading from colonial Massachusetts. I was explaining that the Tea Act of 1773 had actually reduced the price of imported tea in the New England colonies, but the colonists hated the Act anyway; they saw it as a sort of “camel’s nose” maneuver by…