After 21 years teaching at Boulder High School, Mr. Trinkner bids farewell to the school, as he marks the beginning of a new chapter. Yet, for Mr. Trinkner, new beginnings and globe-spanning life changes are an accustomed aspect of life.
Mr. Trinkner is a social studies teacher here at Boulder High School, while in the past, he has taught AP US History and US History, he currently teaches AP Micro and Macroeconomics, along with AP European History. Most known for being Boulder High’s sole economics teacher, he has overseen the economics program “go from having one section of AP Macro to having three or four sections for both, AP Micro and Macro.”
Mr. Trinkner involved himself so deeply with Economics, he told me: “I also ended up being a teacher for economics teachers,” and has been doing so for nine years. Additionally Mr. Trinkner works for the College Board “on the test development committee for AP Macroeconomics.”
Yet overall, one of his most memorable moments to him was the time he spent being the Model United Nations coach and going to conferences with his model UN students. He smiled, reminiscing, “I fondly remember our time in New York and elsewhere.”
Mr. Trinkner has had a similarly memorable time with economics students. Of his many photos on his office wall, illustrating his life, he plucked one of him with his students at the Federal Reserve (after winning a competition called the Fed Challenge), all gathered around the 2006 chairman of the Federal reserve, Ben Bernanke, clad in suits and with the luck of having the opportunity of Mr. Trinkner’s economic education.
My eyes drifted up toward the wall, and up on a shelf was Mr. Trinkner’s physically smallest award – but the one he is most proud of – being the Mary Taylor Award from 2014, picked by Boulder High School students, teachers, and parents to recognize the most outstanding teacher of the year. Accompanying the award on the shelf is his Boettcher’s Award, for having a student nominate him upon winning the Boettcher’s scholarship, and his award for winning the Economics Teacher of the Year in Colorado.
Mr. Trinkner did not set out to pursue teaching as a career, as when he first went to college he originally studied to be a doctor; however his set course was eclipsed by history, when he spent a semester of his junior year at King’s College University in London. There he really fell in love with history. He told me how he “just adored European history and traveling England, seeing castles, cathedrals, museums, and soaking it up.” This experience led to his switch from pre-med to history, and then he went on to get a masters of education.
Mr. Trinkner got his first job teaching overseas in Costa Rica, where he also met his wife, who was another American beginning to teach in a foreign country. After Costa Rica, Mr.Trinkner’s journey continued to “Spain…where [he] taught for two years.” After that, he taught “for three years in South Korea, and three years in New Delhi, India. And at that point, [he] wanted to come to the States.” From this breadth of experiences, Mr. Trinkner will often incorporate them anecdotally into his lectures: from Bubonic Plague outbreaks in India, to Bolivian silver mines and Greek transport strikes.
Mr. Trinkner, after having children, took a hiatus from teaching to come to Boulder. He was working in the IT world, as a technical writer and business consultant. Mr. Trinkner described how “throughout all of that, I have to say, I really missed the classroom. Every time we went to back-to-school nights with my kids, I would smell the classrooms and the textbooks and the schools, and I just wanted to go back into teaching.”
After being in Boulder, the yearn for the classroom brought him back to teaching internationally. Then, finally, after two years in Greece, he came to Boulder High School. He told me: “I enjoyed teaching and living at the school where my children went to, and seeing my students at Safeway and Whole Foods and Pearl Street, and being part of the community where I teach.” Mr. Trinkner’s sons graduated in 2010 and 2013.
As Mr. Trinkner embarks on a course beyond Boulder High School, alongside with his wife who is retiring from Erie High school, they look forward to skipping the summer crowds in Europe by way of autumn, spending time with their granddaughter, and their pursuits of running, cycling and hiking. Mr. Trinkner will continue his long time pursuit of piano, reading history, and refurbishing antique fountain pens. However, most importantly to Mr. Trinkner is his pursuit of birdwatching. Mr. Trinkner said, with brimming joy, “I almost don’t call it a hobby because it’s so much a part of my life that it’s almost who I am, rather than some sort of hobby.”
Mr. Trinkner’s time at Boulder High School is provocative because he managed to capture each turn of life in his stride. He embraced the unexpected and rigged his sail at full mast to capture the wind. It sent him over the globe and with fate’s fortune, to sojourn here at Boulder High. To this remarkable career, his students and I, along with the Boulder High School community, bid Mr. Trinkner farewell, to wherever shores he may land.
