Category: Article

It’s the first day of school. Students arrive at Mr. P’s Physical Science class with a mix of anxiety, interest and uncertainty. What will this year be like in science class? How difficult will the class be? Where are my friends sitting? Who are these new students I do not know? I can’t believe I’m sitting in class right now when just yesterday at this time I was fishing at Bear Creek with my best friend Justin, enjoying the last day of summer vacation… Thoughts are also racing through Mr….

The power of models Although each science in the curriculum has its own lens through which it looks at nature or society, they are united by a common approach. Modern science can be described as an ongoing process of developing and deploying models—not model airplanes or runway models, of course, but simplified representations of complicated objects or systems. Models help us understand things by focusing on their essential features and leaving out the incidental or less important details. Developing a model involves applying inductive reasoning to things or phenomena to…

Not scientific? A serious problem in science education today is an ironic one: science education too often fails to be scientific. This is admittedly an odd statement. How can science education be non-scientific? Isn’t anything to do with presenting scientific knowledge necessarily scientific? Science education today too often fails to proceed in a scientific manner, in a manner that fosters both scientific understanding and thinking. The problem is not with what is being taught. For the most part, the scientific knowledge that is being conveyed is accurate and scientific enough….

I once heard someone say there are at least three reasons to become a teacher: June, July, and August. This response, I suppose, is true, but not because the summer is a time for laziness; rather, it is because the summer offers an opportunity for recreation in the truest sense of that word. It is a time to be made anew and, by this, to live fully. Whether your summer has, up to this point, been full of life or full of languor, now is the time to begin again….

I worry a lot about the current state of free speech. It’s literally my job to worry about it, because I teach a class on the topic of free speech. But after reading through my students’ final exams, I’m feeling a lot better. If you’re also a worrier, maybe you’ll feel better if I share the good news. Three days before the exam, I gave the students the final essay question in advance, and it was nothing if not topical: In April 2022, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”)…

It seems to me that, culturally, we have a misconstrued understanding of the meaning of “victory”. We oscillate between two extremes. At one extreme, we have an obsession with “winning” as an end to be attained at all costs. Lie, cheat, steal; all fine in the pursuit of a championship or a title. At the other, we have the “everyone’s a winner” mentality with all of its various manifestations. Of course, both of these understandings of winning are false and are dangerous to mind, body, and soul, but they both…

Summer is on the horizon and the teachers at The Heights have a roundup of recommended summer reading to sharpen your tools and recharge your batteries.

What does freedom look like in The Heights Upper School? Having arrived early to the Easter Vigil, I found myself pondering this in a dark church.  The thought occurred to me as I looked up through the darkness: the freest man in the world is pinned to that cross.  What does that mean for us?  What does it mean for our children and their education? While freedom defines The Heights, it manifests differently in each division of our beloved School.  In the Lower School it’s especially obvious in its visible,…

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers! And to you especially, mom; I know I wasn’t the easiest kid to raise. Today though, I would like to also praise someone who isn’t known for being appreciated: … the mother-in-law.  My mother-in-law in particular is the reason I wanted to give a shout-out to you all… Elisa is a mother of four daughters and made her career as a teacher, and eventually became head of the high school at which she taught. And although she was never my teacher, she has…

Most of my teaching is, more or less, made up of repackaged lessons taught to me when I was a student at The Heights. This is especially true of lessons on character and virtue and other things of the sort; I think I learned enough about Roman history and poetic allegory in college to teach them well, but about temperance or magnanimity? Those are things I learned only at The Heights.  In the Lower School, one of the ways we teach these sorts of virtues is by emphasizing that the…