Category: Article

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.

Of Students and Sandwiches Grinders are not heroes. In Milford, where I grew up, there were the Oliva brothers who established a small Italian market in 1961 called, what else, Oliva’s Market.  Never mind that two blocks west was Commolli’s Market, and one block east was Mazzarelli’s Market.  Oliva’s is the only one left today and going stronger than ever. Babe, who became the sole proprietor, brought in his oldest son and daughter, and it has expanded into a fine catering business and gift shop in addition to the traditional…

My bride said to me one day, “By the time I get to the end of The Road, I feel cleansed.” We immediately agreed without further words that The Road is awesome, that Blood Meridian is a bit much, and that everyone should read Cormac McCarthy. Then in the back of my mind an interfering little question popped its mischievous head to interfere with our unifying thoughts. Why is that book so good? Because my interfering questions tend to grow rapidly, a bigger question tromped in to ask why any…