Mr. Tom Cox’s approach to telling great stories in the classroom starts with a self-limiting 3×5 notecard. The challenge when telling any story from history is that all such stories run together, are infinitely entangled, and lack the defined clarity of exposition, crisis, climax, and denouement. Mr. Cox provides a practical framework and examples for “putting flesh on dry bones” in an effective, compelling way that students will remember.

This talk was delivered at the Forum Teaching Conference in the fall of 2024.

Teaching Essentials Workshop at The Heights School (June 16-20, 2025)

A Better Approach to History featuring Tom Cox and Bill Dardis

Keeping the Story in History by Mark Grannis 9/22

Seeing History: On Using Images in the History Classroom by Kyle Blackmer 2/22History the Way It Was by Bill Dardis

If we’ve decided against smart phones for our kids, can dumb phones come to the rescue? New options for families have hit the tech market, offering few or select features, and giving parents new things to consider when it comes to kids and phones in 2025. Headmaster Alvaro de Vicente offers a framework for thinking about smart phones, dumb phones, and feature phones in a culture still weighed down by anxiety and distraction.

4:04 Deciding when
5:17 Phones as tools
10:05 The dumb phone: what problem is it solving?
16:11 The feature phone: constant connection
17:30 Healthy friendship
22:03 An age of distraction, even offline
23:44 The need for silence
26:29 School policies
27:14 Family policies

School Phone Bans Alone Do Not Improve Grades or Wellbeing, The Guardian, February 5, 2025

Apple Just Reinvented Its Biggest App, The Atlantic, September 14, 2016

The Anxious Generation: The Great Rewiring of Childhood by Jonathan Haidt

Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation by Josef Pieper

Parents’ Conference: Passing the Faith On to the Next Generation at The Heights School (April 12, 2025) link coming soon

Technology in the Home: Perspective, Principles, and Practices by Michael Moynihan

Forming iGen: On the Forces that Shaped Them featuring Alvaro de Vicente

When Is Your Son Ready for a Smart Phone? featuring Alvaro de Vicente

Smart Phones: Why Wait When He’s “the Only One” featuring Joe Cardenas

On Freedom and Phones featuring Alvaro de Vicente

Reconsidering Electronics under the Tree featuring Alvaro de Vicente

“It is an atmosphere we breathe in, rather than an argument we consider.” Thus wrote T. S. Eliot about the very idea of happiness Americans have adopted for their own. When raising sons in modern America, we should understand what cultural air they—and we—are breathing. Is that “pursuit of happiness” keeping our hearts and minds restless?

In their book, Why We Are Restless, Dr. Benjamin Storey and his wife Dr. Jenna Silber Storey explore the inheritance of American-style happiness: where did it come from? Who has wrestled with it before? And how should we really engage with it? Ben Storey sits down with us to discuss this week on HeightsCast.

00:08:44 Montaigne’s recipe for happiness

00:15:16 “Immanent contentment”: now is enough

00:17:19 Pascal’s reach for God

00:20:11 Rousseau’s earthly transcendence

00:29:09 The American Dream

00:33:45 Democracy and restlessness

00:39:38 The highs and lows of infinite possibility

00:45:02 Advice for high school seniors

00:49:30 Advice for parents

Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment by Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey

ChatGPT Holds These Truths to Be Self-Evident by Mark Grannis

The Importance of History, Part I featuring Dr. Matthew Spalding

At our 2024 Teaching Conference, Dr. John Cuddeback of Christendom College unpacked what boys need from their fathers and teachers in order to grow into the men they truly desire to be. And what boys desire, he argues, comes from their God-given nature: one that resonates with fatherhood, moral character, and the ability to speak truth.

6:21 Today’s rejection of masculinity

10:11 Education: formation of right appetites

15:33 What they enjoy and what pains them

18:52 What boys should desire

21:26 To be fathers

29:15 To be men of character

31:33 To articulate the truth

33:32 How we educate: by example

36:16 By curating influences

37:57 By great art

42:49 By direct articulation, in friendship

LifeCraft, John Cuddeback’s website featuring free courses, videos, and articles

True Friendship: Where Virtue Becomes Happiness by John Cuddeback

The Intentional Household Podcast hosted by John and Sofia Cuddeback

Also on the Forum:

Made in the Image and Likeness: On Man and Masculinity featuring Bishop Erik Varden

Friendship for Fathers featuring John Cuddeback

The Man Fully Alive: On Our Vision featuring Alvaro de Vicente

It’s true: we talk too much. And we know that just one more brilliant lecture from us will not solve our boys’ every problem—but we can’t seem to help ourselves.

This week on HeightsCast, lower school head Colin Gleason takes an intentional look at how we as parents and educators engage our boys, and how we might do better. The conversation reminds us that parenting is relational, not a delivery system, and that ultimately we want to keep the lines of communication open.

2:30 Talk less, engage more

8:31 Over-supervision leads to acting, not being

15:11 Strategies for listening

17:23 Recon: trying to draw something out

21:12 Showing unanxious interest

25:38 Response: when they come to you

28:13 Keep them coming to you

31:01 Let the emotions breathe

37:32 Disrespect and complaints

43:38 The impact of listening

Parents’ Conference: Freedom and Addiction at The Heights School (April 12, 2025) link coming soon

Teaching Men’s Conference at The Heights School (October 2025) link coming soon

On Emotional Presence and Imperfect Parenting featuring Alvaro de Vicente

Seeing Our Boys with Loving Eyes: Not Projects but Persons featuring Tom Royals

Building a Relationship of Trust with Your Son featuring Alvaro de Vicente

In this episode, our guest (an AP U.S. History teacher) and our host (an AP Government teacher) delve into the worthy American most likely missing from your U.S. history or government class.

Orestes Brownson was a nineteenth-century political thinker who wrote about the American project through his unique lens as a post-Civil War American-Catholic. He was well known in his time but is often only featured in the footnotes for the Election of 1840, the Transcendental Movement, and the Emancipation Proclamation. Brownson’s essays, though, belong in the classroom. They seek to answer with optimism and insightful reflection: what is this country all about? For what did our sons die in this great Civil War?

4:20 Why read Brownson?

10:11 A religious and political wanderer

14:01 Arrives at the Catholic Church

17:00 Magnus opus: The American Republic

21:57 “Territorial democracy”

27:44 History as human experience

28:51 Territorial democracy and American Union

32:31 Missteps of democracy

36:54 Brownson’s vision: “Freedom of each with advantage to the other”

37:41 Yet history repeats itself

41:47 America’s role in the story of history

44:55 “Unwritten constitution”

49:36 The task of the modern teacher

54:24 One’s development of ideas over time

The American Republic by Orestes Brownson

“Democratic Principle” by Orestes Brownson

Orestes Brownson Symposium hosted by the American Family Project

“Catholic Lives: Orestes Brownson, the American Newman” on Controversies in Church History

On Faith and Beauty in Churches talk by Joe Cardenas at The Heights School (February 1, 2025)

Series for Heights Fathers: Accompanying Our Sons as They Grow in Understanding of Human Sexuality at The Heights School (Thursdays in February 2025)

Parents’ Conference: Freedom and Addiction at The Heights School (April 12, 2025) link coming soon

Teaching Men’s Conference at The Heights School (October 2025) link coming soon

ChatGPT Holds These Truths to Be Self-Evident by Mark Grannis

The Importance of Ugly History by Mark Grannis

Keeping the Story in History by Mark Grannis

Seeing History: On Using Images in the History Classroom by Kyle Blackmer

Patriotism and Piety: Honoring Founders and Fathers featuring Matthew Mehan

All the first universities were—St. Thomas Aquinas would tell us—Catholic ones. But in this modern day, it takes intentionality to maintain the rich tradition of Catholic education.

In a talk recorded for HeightsCast, Dr. Peter Kilpatrick, president of The Catholic University of America, spoke to families at The Heights about what it means to be a Catholic university. He first consults the experts: Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, John Paul the Great, and Pope Benedict XVI. He then offers examples from his own career in school leadership, and how to put the exhortations of popes and saints into action on campus.

6:14 Universities: a Catholic inheritance

8:06 Newman and Aquinas on universities

11:58 Papal directives for Catholic universities

15:56 Theodrama vs. egodrama

19:16 Getting these ideas on campus

19:36 Mission-enthusiastic faculty

21:26 Mission-integrated curricula

24:12 Counseling with a Christian anthropology

25:01  Teaching a professional call to holiness

26:21 Campus ministry

28:15 The distinctive value of Catholic education

31:10 Q1: Technology and the next 50 years

36:13 Q2: College affordability and value

The Idea of a University by St. John Henry Newman

Ex Corde Ecclesiae by Pope St. John Paul II

Regensburg Address on Faith, Reason, and the University by Pope Benedict XVI

“The Real Cost of College Education—for Students, Families, and the Nation” by Jamie Merisotis

Superhabits: The Universal System for a Successful Life by Andrew Abela

Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth by Catherine Pakaluk

Receiving Beauty: A Liberal Arts Education featuring Dr. George Harne

Considerations for the College-Bound Student featuring Dr. Peter Kilpatrick

The Idea of the Liberal Arts University, Part I featuring Dr. Thomas Hibbs

Rethinking College: Why go? How? When? featuring Arthur Brooks

Advent invites us to reflect on our Christian disposition, oriented towards peace, hope, joy, and love. St. Josemaría Escrivá was known to summarize that disposition by calling it, simply… “simple.” In The Way, he praises the apostles and St. Joseph for imitating Jesus himself in being simple. And then he exhorts us: “May you not lack simplicity.”

Heights faculty Joe Cardenas and Nate Gadiano join us this week to explore the Christian meaning of “simplicity,” beginning with the ways that God is simple: unified, sincere, essential, and wholly true. As we strive to reflect his example, how do we find that interior disposition of simplicity? And how can we help our boys find it too?

3:07 A Catholic sense of simplicity

10:13 Moving beyond “minimalism”

18:38 Simplicity in Scripture

20:43 Social simplicity

24:12 As opposed to duplicity

26:08 How spiritual direction simplifies you

30:36 A unity of purpose

32:39 Distinct from feelings-based “honesty”

39:02 Helping our boys as parents, mentors

41:41 A boy’s insecurity, overcome by trust

47:38 Secure in divine filiation

The Way, Furrow, and The Forge by St. Josemaría Escrivá

The Virtues Playlist on The Heights Forum