Category: Article

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…

The importance of parents in the life of the school cannot be overstated. As the primary educators of their children, parents bear the responsibility for forming their sons and daughters in all areas of life. The fact that parents welcome us as teachers to partner with them in this all-important endeavor is both humbling and inspiring. With this partnership in mind, we must consider parent communication to be a primary role in our work as teachers. St. Josemaría Escrivá even went so far as to say that parents, not students,…

To approach a healthy way to look at smartphones, we need to move our focus away from dopamine spikes and addictive apps, and towards a love of reality.