Boys are already fully engaged in all types of academic and co-curricular activities that reflect the second half of the school year. As we are quickly settling into 2023, I hope you find this installment of PDS Spirit to be a helpful resource. This issue contains book recommendations by our faculty and an article by Laura Glenn on the important developmental benefits about reading with your sons that we hope will be useful.

First, I am grateful to our faculty for developing a shortlist of book recommendations. Each year, a columnist I read releases his ‘Top 10’ articles of the year. I am always eager to see his shortlist because he has scoured the best of excellent writing I might have missed. With our busy schedules and fast-paced lives, I’m always grateful to be given a shortlist.

You will find in these pages a number of books pulled together to reflect the age and stage you find yourself in as a parent. Several of the books recommended have been helpful to faculty in understanding their work with various age ranges as teachers and parents. However, nearly every book recommended is written for parents, not just educators. We hope you can take away one book suggestion that will help you this year in educating and parenting your son.

You will notice that many of the recommended works were written recently. As a rule of thumb, I have always thought it a good idea for every few books you read that were recently written to pick up an older one the next time. Each era has its own outlook. Reading a few older books on education and parenting helps us understand not only a specific author’s outlook but our own outlook better. In that spirit, I would like to offer you my own book suggestion. It is a much ‘older’ read but excellent and enduring – Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son: A Study in Two Temperaments.

In addition to book recommendations for parent reading, you’ll find an article about our recently launched Cultural Expeditions Program and the role boys play in forming the unfinished narrative of our country’s story by Jason Hewer. Also, you can read about the importance of being a research-invested school in an article written by Emily Lequerica.

Lastly, if you enter the school outside the morning or afternoon carline, you typically enter PDS through our middle entrance along Poplar Avenue. You will find in the pages that follow a few images of updates that will soon be made to our middle entrance. Very soon, PDS will have a more defined space marking and illuminating PDS’ presence along Poplar Avenue. Construction should begin no later than summer and be completed before the beginning of the following academic year. We will keep you abreast of any updates that might cause disruption to traffic.

Happy reading!

Brad Sewell
Head of School