Trinitas Blog

Last week, we shared ten practical tips for achieving enduring success and experiencing the wonderful fruit of classical Christian education at Trinitas, This week, we have ten MORE practical tips we've assembled from our teachers which we hope will benefit your family.

The best things in life are often also the hardest things in life, and classical Christian education is no exception to this truism. To help Trinitas parents and students achieve enduring success at Trinitas and experience the wonderful fruit of classical Christian education, we've assembled these ten practical tips for success at Trinitas taken directly from our teachers. Simple, practical, but sometimes a bit pointed, we hope these steps are received in the spirit they are offered and are helpful to you.

Classical education is built upon the Trivium - a three-stage process spanning the entirety of K-12 education with the purpose of nurturing and forming biblically-minded and well-educated students utilizing the great books of the Western world as a curriculum. The first stage of the classical progression - the grammar stage - begins in kindergarten and terminates roughly in 6th grade. Students in this stage are especially apt to memory and are encouraged to commit many facts and premises of literature, history, grammar, poetry, arithmetic, science, and the Bible to memory. The logic stage roughly spans grades 7-9 and (as students at this age seem by nature particularly apt to argument) has an emphasis upon linking the facts so committed in the grammar stage to practical utility through the use of formal argument. Finally, the poetic stage, roughly spanning the balance of high school, is a time in which most students feel a natural yearning for self-invention and self-expression, and are encouraged to draft and defend properly factual (grammar level) and properly reasoned (logic level) arguments in aesthetically appealing forms.

You may have noticed a recent addition to your Nuntium, our weekly communication between teachers and parents. We have begun including a section that begins with “What’s the deal with…?” that addresses a particular cultural distinctive of Trinitas. The first topic was “What’s the deal with Unity?” and the second was “What’s the deal with first-time obedience?”

Some time back I said something during Morning Meeting that must have caught some folks by surprise. It may not have been exactly this, but it was something like this: “We are image bearers. We are made in the image of God. We bear His likeness. And so everything we do is either telling the truth or telling a lie about who God is.”

As Trinitas celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, we are delighted to welcome a number of new faces to our school community. In addition to more than a dozen new families, we are welcoming several new faculty members and one new administrator to the Trinitas community. We thank God for his blessings on our school and are eager to introduce these fine folks to you.

One goal not written in the Trinitas mission or vision statements is the goal of building a close community among Trinitas families, but it is our goal nonetheless. Community building isn’t a foreign concept at schools, and especially at the college level since it is a retention tool for colleges and universities. College students who might otherwise consider dropping out or transferring to another school may be reluctant to do that if they have grown close to their classmates, professors, and others at the school. For Trinitas, our reasons for building community run deeper.

The common notion about teachers at the end of the school year is that they run out of the building screaming like banshees and then retreat to the comfort and ease of lounging beside the pool all summer to recover. Frequently during the last week of school, parents will ask teachers what they plan to do all summer. I remember one parent who stopped by the school a couple of weeks into summer and was truly dumbfounded to find the parking lot full, the office well-staffed, and all the teachers hard at work. “Don’t y’all know it’s summer?” he stammered. Yes, we do.