Category: HeightsCast

In the past twenty years, research suggests that parents are worrying more about their children and spending more to provide them with comforts. In spite of such worry and wealth, the past twenty years have also seen an increase in these same American-born children from well-to-do families being diagnosed with various psychiatric disorders. Meanwhile, parents tend to swing from overly strict to overly lenient. Balancing love, both tender and tough, is a difficult art. To help us dive deeper into this parental task, we welcome Dr. Leonard Sax to HeightsCast….

Hell, Dante expresses, is being trapped by our false attempts to be free. Thus, the Comedy’s Satan is forever stuck in the ice of a lake made frozen by the beating of his wings as he attempts to “free” himself from the reality of God. Education, on the other hand, frees us from such a lake by leading us to embrace, with the fullness of our being, the Truth which sets us free. This week on HeightCast we welcome Dr. Joseph Lanzilotti for a discussion of what Pope Benedict XVI…

What does it mean to be “civilized”? What is justice? What is a citizen? Given the opportunity, would you have killed Julius Caesar? Was Nero inevitable, or is it possible to keep one’s wits while running such a powerful empire? These are a few of the questions that eighth graders at The Heights are challenged to ponder together in their core class. With the help of their teachers and a new history textbook, the boys not only consider these questions amongst themselves but do so in dialogue with some of…

As teachers and parents, it is often difficult to find the balance between leniency and strictness, love and fear. Getting the right tone, being firm in principle and flexible in preference, is indeed an art and an especially difficult one. While nothing can replace personal experience for growing in this art, self-reflection is a great aid to this end. This week on HeightsCast, Mr. Colin Gleason, Head of the Lower School, offers an aid to our personal reflection. The episode features a presentation by Mr. Gleason from our recent Art…

It’s not merely where you are going, but how you get there, that matters. And as we often find ourselves going places in cars, it is worth stopping to consider how we spend our car rides.  In this week’s episode, we welcome back to the podcast Mr. Kyle Blackmer for a discussion of the daily commute. Whether we carpool or ride solo, Mr. Blackmer helps us to reframe how we approach this daily endeavor which can easily become dead time at best, and dreaded time at worst.  Kyle shows us…

In a recent national survey of adults in America, a striking sixty-one percent of young adults (age 18-25) reported feeling serious loneliness. Such feelings of loneliness were also accompanied by anxiety and depression. Although humans are by nature social animals, it would seem that forming deep friendships may not always come so naturally. How do we form friendships? How do we help our sons form friendships? What even is friendship? To help us answer these questions, we welcome to HeightsCast John Cuddeback, professor of philosophy at Christendom College and Life…

With another year having passed—perhaps even sped by—and a new one underfoot, HeightsCast returns with a discussion of time and solitude with Mike Ortiz and Rob Greving. Together, Mike and Rob invite us to slow down as they unpack their two recently published articles on the Forum.  Mr. Ortiz dives into Henry David Thoreau’s cabin life and the importance of intentional times of solitude in our lives, while Mr. Greving considers our often uneasy relationship with time and the good of slowing down, even as the world speeds up.  As…

From the very start, the founders of The Heights understood education to consist in the communication of a culture. As culture often enters a boy’s mind through his senses, an important means of this transmission is the art and architecture of a school. Indeed, in many ways buildings embody the ideals of an institution.  This week Joe Cardenas, head of mentoring and long-time art history teacher, joins us for a conversation on the importance of beauty in education. Rooting the conversation in the American tradition, Joe helps us see why…

In many schools, education is understood in reductively intellectual terms. The point of teaching, it would seem, is merely to inform, to fill the mind with data, to train the intellect to perform tasks and solve puzzles. To be sure, information and intellectual virtues are essential aspects of education; but they are not the whole, and to make them so would be to reduce the person to his mind. In this talk, taken from our recent Art of Teaching Conference, Anton Vorozhko helps us understand the role of the heart in the…

In this episode, we feature a recorded lecture given by Rich Moss in his introductory presentation at the Art of Teaching conference hosted by The Heights Forum last week. In this talk, Rich explains why teaching is an art, what that art is, and what the tools are utilized by the teaching artist.