Trinitas Blog

Last week I revealed that 92% of Trinitas alumni reported they were well prepared for college. Of the few that didn’t feel prepared, four Trinitas alumni stated they started out behind their college classmates in math; two of them were engineering majors, and the other two did not mention their majors in the response. This week, I will explain why they may have started out behind and also talk about where classical students stand in math compared to students in a modern, STEM-focused education model.

For about a decade now in the education world, stem has been the most frequently uttered word by politicians, bureaucrats, curriculum marketers, administrators, and teachers. Not “stem” as in the stem of a flower, but “STEM” as in the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Students are being pushed to pursue those fields for several reasons, not the least of which is that the job market is good in those broad categories. Even though the job outlook is good in those fields, US students are lagging dismally behind students from some other nations in math and science proficiency, a fact that translates directly into economic terms on a global scale, which is another reason educators are emphasizing STEM in recent years and targeting it as an area of focus in K-12 education. The bottom line, though, is that our national deficiency in math and science is more than that: it is a deficiency in education. Math and science are merely symptoms of that much larger problem, and they are front and center these days for the aforementioned reasons.

A Trinitas board member sent me an interesting article recently, entitled “When Knights Surrender Their Swords, Beasts Will Devour Maidens.” The author, Paul Bois, has written hundreds of articles expositing the Christian perspective on a host of political and social issues. I haven’t read them all, but this one had a solid message.

The subject of the article was this Weinstein fellow who is in so much hot water recently for taking advantage of young women in the movie business. I have little to add to that conversation, but I do want to comment on Bois’s theme. Reduced to its essence, his assertion is that this sort of thing is happening in our society because we allow it.

Last week during Morning Meeting our theme was “Direct My Steps According to Your Word.” All week we read passages that spoke of God’s great desire to see His people living according to His word. On Friday I told the students I used to know a preacher who had a habit of saying, “If you think all there is to the Christian life is getting saved and baptized, then as soon as you get saved and baptized we should take you out behind the church and shoot you.” This was his crude way of saying to the congregation that Jesus hadn’t saved them to sit around and wait for the rapture or the second coming or whatever comes next. They weren’t saved for death, but for life.

I loves poems.  The first poem I ever taught at Trinitas started like this:

Sing, goddesss, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict                                                              Atreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.

To do a thing well, you have to begin well—you have to start off on the right foot. At Trinitas we want every day to go well, so we begin every day with a short time of devotion and worship we call Morning Meeting.

At 7:50 each morning the entire student body gathers together in the Grand Hall where we start Morning Meeting by reading God’s word.

As varsity sports seasons get underway this weekend, I want to remind you what it means to represent Trinitas as a fan. You can find a thorough explanation of “The Ideal Trinitas Sports Fan” in the Family Handbook, but I want to give you a few quick reminders.

Last week I introduced the term father famine to this blog. The term I have only recently heard from my pastor; the idea the term denotes I have observed for years. The term fitly describes the absence of fathers and fathering in our culture. We have developed cultural amnesia, and one of the things we’ve forgotten, which is key to any culture, is fathering. By “we” I mean western culture generally, but to be more specific, I mean Christians seem to have forgotten the importance of fathering and, therefore, how to father. There is a dark irony in this Christian forgetfulness. The obvious irony is that fathering ought to be on our minds all the time because we speak of and look to God as our Heavenly Father; the subtler irony is that remembering is a predominant theme throughout Scripture.