Trinitas Blog

As COVID19 school closures continue, Florida is being held up to the nation as an example of how well internet based instruction can be done. Still, in almost daily briefings I receive about Florida’s schools, administrators and teachers are dealing with problems ranging from poor connectivity to students simply not showing up for online class. To say teachers, parents, and students everywhere are just trying to make the best of a nearly impossible situation would be the epitome of understatement.

Last week I decided to write about the downside of internet based instruction in an attempt to offer some balance to the idea that online school is the next best thing to being there. I am convinced it is not. Still, the internet does offer schools another tool to overcome the new hurdles we are all facing. In full disclosure, even since I posted last week, Trinitas has increased its online instruction for 9^th – 12^th grades. Most classes are now offering the option of meeting at least once a week online for some face-to-virtual-face time with instructors. Technology offers us a tool, and we are using it sparingly, cautiously. I suggested last week that the carryover from using the internet for entertainment will taint its use as a tool. Three detrimental effects particularly concern me as an administrator and teacher: passivity, shortened attention span, and diminished imagination.

It became clear in mid-March that most of the nation’s schools would have to close for weeks that could turn into months. There ensued then a mad rush to get electronic devices into the hands of students. The nation’s school districts spent millions of dollars in the effort, and probably billions once the final tallies come in. Hand wringing over lack of internet access for rural and low income students quickly followed. When all was said and done, however, many of the nation’s students were engaged in some kind of internet-based learning by the first week of April.

And for what? One Florida school district set the goal of having students complete “at least one assignment each day.” I am acquainted with a freshman and a junior in another Florida school district who spend fewer than two hours each day on their internet-based school work, and a large portion of that time is squandered waiting for completed assignments to upload. Zoombombing has occurred to the horror of teachers and students. With each passing week attendance wains in many Florida school districts, and some teachers refuse to take attendance. Certainly there is no single reason this internet schooling doesn’t seem to be as successful as many had hoped, but I suggest that it can even be detrimental to the habits of good students.

Two chief goals of classical education are to help students become lifelong learners and to give them the tools they need be successful at learning for the rest of their lives. While a person may catch the bug for learning any time in life, there is no better season for inspiring that love of learning right down into a person’s bones than in the early years before he or she becomes a teenager.

As the school year winds down, we enter the season for reflection. For students, now is time for final performances, academic awards, and the accumulation of all kinds of accolades for the year. I am always a little in awe of Trinitas students as I look back over their accomplishments and realize all they have done, and done well, in a single year. Surely this euphoria upon reflection holds true for any hardworking student in any school—it is not reserved for Trinitas students. I am, however, always amazed at the number of Trinitas students who do so very well over the year in such a wide variety of activities. What I have found is that classical education exposes students to a broad range of experiences and then provides opportunities for students to learn, perform and compete in activities as different as baseball and drama. By encouraging students to drink deeply from many fountains of knowledge rather than specializing in one, classical education creates Renaissance men and women. 

I met a student recently who was about to graduate high school and the first two years of college all in the same day! Not only is that an impressive accomplishment, but also it is an accomplishment that has become increasingly common over the past decade or so. The rise of dual enrollment opportunities that allow high school students to take college courses has made it possible for thousands of American teens to graduate high school with an AA degree from a local college or university. Again, that is a pretty amazing accomplishment!

A parent recently sent me this link to an article by columnist Walter Williams written in response to the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes referred to as the National Report Card. In it, Williams reveals and then comments on some startling statistics concerning the state of public education in our nation. The parent who sent the article said this is “good motivation to keep doing what we are doing.” I agree wholeheartedly.

People come and people go. That is a truth in any organization. It is human nature, I suppose to some extent, for people to get interested in a thing, even convinced about a thing, then lose interest or become unconvinced over time. Because it is enrollment season and families are deciding whether or not they ought to attend Trinitas, I want to spend the next few weeks focusing on some of the top reasons people give for losing interest in and leaving Trinitas.

Sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, American colleges and universities began to use a form of grading students that resembles what most high schools, colleges, and universities still use today: A, B, C, D, and F. The grades are intended to be a way of measuring and reporting a student’s performance on a given assignment or within a given subject over a period of time. They are useful for that task, but far from perfect. At Trinitas we also grade students using a variation of the aforementioned marks.