Matt Bolton. Commencement Speech. Page 1
Commencement Speech May 30, 2014 Matt Bolton Thank you, Mr. Lyness, Mr. Oroszlany, Mr. Sheehy, members of the board, parents, faculty members, and students. It is an honor and a privilege to speak to you today. I feel a particular connection to this commencement and to this senior class, not only because, like you seniors, I am closing out my final year at Loyola, but because I have always found you to be a particularly smart, funny, kind, and personable group of individuals. I’ve been lucky enough to teach Freshman English throughout my time at Loyola, and was lucky enough to have taught many of you back when you were fourteen or so. You were smaller then, and quieter, and at the beginning, full of trepidation. If you were given a quiz or a homework assignment, you would ask questions like, “Where it says name, should I include my middle name? Is just an initial okay?” Asked to write a paragraph, you would say “How many sentences should be in each paragraph?” and “Does a question count as a sentence?” and “Can I start a sentence with “and”? During those first few weeks and months, you wanted to get everything just right. But you also had the enthusiasm that seems to be hardwired into all freshmen. You would play any game with gusto, from an organized contest like Jeopardy to some half-baked activity I thought up on the walk upstairs to class. Asked to bring props to class for staging Romeo and Juliet in the Jugyard, you would show up bearing lightsabers, capes, fencing foils, and swords made of paper towel rolls wrapped in tin foil. Later, you would claim that all of this stuff belonged to your little brother, but we knew the truth. The truth is, freshmen throw themselves into group activities with abandon. Put three or four freshmen into a randomly-selected group, and it’s like they have found their long-lost brothers and sisters. Immediately, without fail, they have to give the group a name, and immediately they believe that their group is the best ever. Where does it come from, this combination of earnestness and enthusiasm, of trepidation and joy? Perhaps from a common source: a desire to belong, to be known and accepted, to find a new home away from home. Freshmen bring these same qualities to the books that we read together. They have, as their name implies, a fresh perspective on classic stories. Every year, for example, someone is shocked that Romeo and Juliet don’t end up living happily ever after. And every year, I, too, learn something new about the books I teach, because I’m experiencing them with a new set of readers. Of all the books on our freshman syllabus, the one that most rewards this kind of annual re-reading may be Homer’s Odyssey.