The Heights strives to always improve the education it provides young men. Two structural improvements over the past several years include strengthening the liberal arts course offerings through the core humanities sequence and enabling upperclassmen to benefit from the collegiate semester experience, which allows them to take a wider variety of courses and cultivate their own interests. For example, a student interested in classics can take a course translating Augustine from Latin in the fall and a separate course translating Herodotus from Greek in the spring.
This sort of academic freedom for the students is the result of faculty innovations in their respective departments (offering new courses relevant for the needs of young men today, refining course bibliographies and sources, etc.). Just over the past ten years, many new courses have been introduced to the course catalogue: the Art department added woodworking; Computer Science offers Python and Java programming; Philosophy has evolved from a few elective courses to a structured series covering Logic, Natural Philosophy, Metaphysics, and History of Western Thought. Our faculty truly is the school’s greatest asset; this is demonstrated in their diligence in mastering their fields and developing the curriculum to better engage the minds of young men. This year is no exception when it comes to new and improved course offerings.
Classics:
When deciding how to improve the classics department, faculty consider authors and topics that will provide students a solid understanding for national standards, but also seek to further explore the Classical period and even the whole breadth of classical literature from the last two millennia. Here are the new courses in Classics this academic year.
Plato (GREEK 581 – Yaceczko)
Aquinas (LATIN 445 – Yaceczko)
Advanced Latin Grammar and Composition (LATIN 549 – Yaceczko)
Spoken Latin (LATIN 552 – Yaceczko)
English:
The upper school’s new English elective system will allow juniors and seniors to choose semester long seminars that more deeply focus on specific literary authors and genres. Students may select either high school or college level courses, as indicated below. Some of these classes will be offered in the fall as well as the spring, but others for only one semester.
High School Level
Journeys Hard and Long (ENG 303 – Breslin)
Sword and Pen: Literature of War (ENG 304 – Breslin)
Fitzgerald and Hemingway (ENG 305 – Ortiz)
Irish Literature (ENG 306 – Miggins)
Faulkner and O’Connor (ENG 307 – Miggins)
Shakespeare, Marlowe, Fletcher (ENG 309 – Bissex)
College Level
Tolstoy’s War and Peace (ENG 403 – Breslin)
Medieval Lit of Northern Europe (ENG 404 – Breslin)
T.S. Eliot and Modernism (ENG 405 – Ortiz)
Comedy, Tragedy, and the Epic (ENG 406 – Miggins)
Russian Literature 862-1880 (ENG 407 – Bissex)
20th Century Russian Literature (ENG 408 – Bissex)
Electives:
This year there are two new elective courses. Mark Hieronymus will offer a course on Photography and Graphic Design (ART 315). The Heights is particularly thankful to our generous donors who made the acquisition of camera equipment and computer software for this class possible.
New faculty member Derrick Chambers will teach Introduction to Investing (ECON 323). In a world where young people are surrounded by news, information, and technology related to financial markets, this course will help our students understand the history and fundamentals of how it all works.
*This article had a few edits from its initial publishing on 8/13/2021
