Category: Article

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…

Complaining is bad. At least, that is the prevailing view. Complaining is often tossed into the same category as whining[1] and talking back. In other words, it’s insubordination of the highest order, and thus a surefire way to get in trouble from above—whether as a child or an adult. Instead of getting results in fervent pursuit of justice and truth, complaining tends to make the situation worse. The injustices build upon each other as stacks of stone over an ever-deepening grave. But what if we have it all wrong? What…

If asked, “Why do we teach the diagramming of sentences?” I suppose the simplest answer is to communicate well and to think properly.   We communicate well in writing when a sentence means what we want it to mean.  We fail in this if the words aren’t spelled correctly, are written illegibly, or are put together in such a way as to have more than one possible meaning.  The correction of the first two reasons are topics for another time.  The third reason – the proper construction of a sentence –…

The pale light that peeked through the dormant trees was quickly dissipating as we walked out the door into the bone-gnawing wet of late-February New Hampshire. The road was covered in graying slush from a week of snow and a day of rain. I clutched a ball of cooking string in my right-hand pocket as I told the man I had met a month before that I was penniless, collecting compost for chump change, but that I loved his daughter, so would he grant her hand in marriage? Two hours…

Minding the Truth What does Gawain and the Green Knight offer The Heights freshman? What might it offer you this Lent? The tale has much to offer. It’s a tale of Arthur and his knights. It’s a fairy tale with a surprise ending. (This article does contain a spoiler, so if you don’t know the tale, please read Gawain or at least a children’s version before proceeding.) In addition to all that, perhaps the central gift the poem offers is its presentation of the human being as the one who…

The language a man speaks is the world in which he lives and strives; it belongs to him more essentially than the land and things he calls his home. —Romano Guardini Last fall, the science department gave a presentation on how they treat the boys as “sovereign knowers.” That is, the boys learn science by their own experience as much as (or more than) by textbooks. This means observation. For example, diagrams of a chicken’s development may be helpful; but it is far more helpful (not to mention more fun)…

Lower School Teacher Elias Naegele offers a few helpful suggestions for how to keep the spirit of adventure alive through all four seasons in and out of home.

As the dust starts to settle on the controversies of Pope Benedict XVI’s departure from this life, many of those controversies, it has to be admitted, are inside baseball for Catholics: the funeral ceremonies, the lack of state delegations in attendance, Pope Francis’ brief (some say too brief) homily, and so forth. These will surely become chaff in the settlements of history. What I think will be the core achievement in Benedict’s life for years to come will be his attempts to teach us how to see. The range of…

Click here to download a printable PDF of this chapter of the textbook, Physical Science and Technology. Purpose: To understand what science is, and what technology is; how science proceeds; and how technology proceeds. I wrote this textbook with the hope that you will find this the most interesting science course you have ever taken. I hope you will be able to look at the technologies you use every day with “new eyes” and understand very well how science is done. To start, let’s define a few terms. What is science? What is…

It was a Monday morning, the hour before lunch. My colleagues and I met in those last few days before the spring semester began to discuss the challenges of plagiarism. It was not simply that a student might present someone else’s work as his or her own: our problem was the new open AI chatbot called ChatGPT (which may some day soon replace Google). Our problem was that a student might ask ChatGPT to write his or her paper, or physics lab report, or translate his Latin, or do his…