We often speak of a pedagogical friendship between teacher and student: the earnest desire for the student’s good, the collaborative adventure through difficult material, and the trust built thereby. But we shouldn’t oversimplify this friendship: it’s not merely to be liked by our students.

From rookie teachers to decades-long veterans, we can all feel that pull to be the “favorite teacher.” But what kind of frameworks should we keep in mind as we serve our students well? This week, Heights Headmaster Alvaro de Vicente unpacks the very human desire to be liked, the perils of seeking popularity, and what our students really need from us.

00:03:16 The student is not for your gain 00:05:18 Including social-emotional gains 00:11:10 Practical pitfalls of seeking popularity 00:15:31 Why we want to be liked 00:19:21 Give the respect you want 00:21:46 Like your students 00:26:03 Where to find stable satisfaction

Parents Conference: Fostering Our Sons’ Faith at The Heights School (April 12, 2025)

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

Respectful Dominion: On Discipline featuring Colin Gleason

Order and Surprise: On Beauty and the Western Tradition featuring Lionel Yaceczko

“Offer it up!” Do we receive that invitation with a wince or a nod? Heights Assistant Headmaster Tom Royals invites us to examine our approach to Lent and “offering it up”—with an emphasis on offering. Mr. Royals reflects on the “happy obligation” that is the habit of sacrifice, and he considers the liturgical seasons of Lent, Passiontide, Eastertide, and ordinary time as gifts from the Church.

4:21 “Offer it up”

8:37 Look to the cross

10:59 Offering it up as a pattern and practice

12:47 Keeping the Lord company

16:22 Our reactions to setbacks

20:57 History of Lent: an ecclesial framework

23:22 Our Lent so far

25:44 Lent in the family culture

28:24 Easter: the feast of feasts

32:02 These next ten days

Holy Rosary (with images) by Josemaria Escriva

Parents Conference: Fostering Our Sons’ Faith at The Heights School (April 12, 2025)

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

Convivium for Teaching Men at The Heights School (November 13-15, 2025)

Learn to Turn featuring Tom Royals

As a Valley veteran, Tom Steenson has seen patterns emerge from his two decades of parent-teacher conferences. He invites us to sit down for a not-so-hypothetical conference featuring the recurring advice he offers to the parents of his lower school students. In short, Mr. Steenson hopes to encourage parents in their parental authority and to help them identify (or sometimes even invent) opportunities for growth in their young men.

3:25 Encourage parental instincts

7:03 Trust in the long game

9:02 “Better late than early”TM

11:38 Exercise his accountability

20:05 Let him help others

22:48 Don’t eliminate friction

24:05 Beware the schedule

26:36 Help him want to read

Parents Conference: Fostering Our Sons’ Faith at The Heights School (April 12, 2025)

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

A Guide to Parent-Teacher Conferences by Kyle Blackmer

Partnering with Parents by Michael Moynihan

Communicating with Parents by Kyle Blackmer

Dumb Phones, Feature Phones, and the New Tech Landscape featuring Alvaro de Vicente

“Are you a classical school?” It’s a question many parents and educators will have to answer at some point. St. Martin’s Academy in Fort Scott, Kansas, likes to say they’re not exactly classical—more like medieval.

At St. Martin’s, a boys’ boarding school and working farm for grades 9-12, Adam Taylor and a team of educators seek to nurture authentic masculinity, awaken wonder, and heal the imagination. This week on HeightsCast, Mr. Taylor talks with us about the vision of St. Martin’s, and gives us ideas we can take into our own understanding of boys’ education.

3:35 The medieval model

7:12 The path to “Dean of Magistri”

14:38 Nurturing authentic masculinity

19:14 Healing the imagination

25:00 Boys need reality and heroes

33:49 Soulcraft: the role of work at St. Martin’s

36:54 Forms of manly friendship

40:57  Time management for teachers

45:35 Recommended reading

St. Martin’s Academy in Fort Scott, Kansas

“The Necessity of Chivalry” by C. S. Lewis

The Tuft of Flowers by Robert Frost

John Senior and the Restoration of Realism by Fr. Francis Bethel

Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education by James S. Taylor

Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education by Stratford Caldecott

Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education by Stratford Caledcott

Parents Conference: Fostering Our Sons’ Faith at The Heights School (April 12, 2025)

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

Breathing Narnian Air: Loving Modernity as a Medievalist featuring Jason Baxter

Shaping Your Son’s Moral Imagination featuring Alvaro de Vicente

On Moral Imagination, Part I featuring Alvaro de Vicente

Pope St. John Paul II outlined the four pillars of formation for seminarians back in 1992 with his apostolic exhortation Pastores dabo vobis. For years, Fr. Carter Griffin has used this framework to walk with seminarians through a program of human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral formation at St. John Paul II Seminary in Washington, DC.

With his recent book, Forming Families, Forming Saints, Fr. Griffin brings that rich framework into the context of parenting. In this episode, he provides parents with an overview of the four pillars of formation, and offers encouragement and practical wisdom about what it means for the family to be a “domestic church.”

5:43 Family: the domestic church 8:38 Similarities to seminary formation 10:45 Not just self-optimization 15:03 The four pillars of formation 18:30 Sincerity: the truth is never a problem 25:50 Parental expectations 30:29 A childlike relationship with God 33:48 What faith is 37:41 Introducing our children to prayer 43:42 Struggles with prayer 46:41 An apostolic approach for families 48:34 Comfortable with being different 52:52 Awareness of vocations: 11 and 11th 56:31 An outlook of hope

Forming Families, Forming Saints by Fr. Carter Griffin

Optimal Work Program by Dr. Kevin Majeres

Parents Conference at The Heights School (April 12, 2025)

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

Fostering Vocations in a Digital Age featuring Fr. Carter Griffin

Magnanimity and the Great-Souled Man featuring Fr. Carter Griffin

A great learning experience comes at the material using different practices—listening, reading, memorizing, interrogating, doing, speaking, and/or writing about the idea until it crystallizes in the student’s mind. And a great teacher facilitates those practices in his class plan.

For his talk at the 2024 Forum Teaching Conference, upper school teacher Austin Hatch borrowed the “three modes of teaching” proposed by author and educator Mortimer Adler. These are: didactic instruction, supervised practice, and active participation. Mr. Hatch explains why they are each needed in good proportion, and what each can look like in the classroom.

00:04:25 The beginning and end is friendship 00:09:57 Didactic instruction: be brief and clear 00:12:23 Supervised practice: make the time 00:20:54 Active participation: host a seminar or performance 00:31:27 Beholding a man in performance 00:33:21 Q1: preparing students for a seminar 00:35:07 Q2: escaping the grade game

Paideia Program: An Educational Syllabus by Mortimer Adler

De Amicitia (On Friendship) by Cicero

Featured opportunities:

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

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