Before the start of the school year, Kish went back to The Heights School for a conference on the importance of mentoring.
Alvaro de Vicente, the headmaster of The Heights School for more than 20 years, described mentoring as “conveying what it means to be a Christian gentleman and how would a Christian man deal with those situations.”
De Vicente explained that the conference on mentoring is an opportunity for educators to learn how to serve as life coaches for their students. Some of the discussions included developing rapport and trust with mentees, fostering their mentees’ spiritual growth, and fostering difficult conversations.
As headmaster of an all-boys school, de Vicente said, “one of the challenges that we have in education is that we try to treat boys as if they were little kids but we judge them as if they were grown-ups.”
“I think we just tend to forget the mistakes that we made at their age,” he added. “So, we tried to reverse that and treat them as grown-ups, put more responsibilities on them, pull them up by the way that we deal with them but then judge them as boys.”
De Vicente shared that he believes the most important thing to do to prepare for a good school year is to “get the faculty back together and remind each other why we’re here.”