Trinitas Blog

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.

Nearly twenty-five years ago a handful of Christian parents decided they wanted a better education for their children than what was available to them. Trinitas Christian School was born out of the initiative they took to solve that problem. All these years later, parents are still making Trinitas what it is. As we wind down a busy spring semester, filled with events led and staffed by volunteer parents, and head into the summer, it is good to pause here and thank our parents who make Trinitas possible.

This weekend, Trinitas students continued the long tradition of dramatic stage productions with two performances of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In the midst of amazing costumes and captivating sets, it is helpful for us to consider why Trinitas invests time and resources into drama.

By definition, drama is a picture or representation of human life in that succession and change of events that we call story told by means of dialogue and presenting in action the successive emotions involved. As Shakespeare wrote, all the world’s a stage and each of us plays a part. Drama enables students to enter past, present, and future worlds and to explore and discover the lives of others, whether in historical, biblical, or literary settings. 

Drama is another tool for educators to use to teach the essentials of the core disciplines of Christian education.