M AY 2 6 , 2 0 1 9 COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY
J
Introduction of William S. Speers
A
s a member of the faculty and leader of students and teachers for forty years, Will Speers ignited and developed St. Andrew’s School as one of the great secondary schools in the world. His teaching expresses a reverence and understanding of the art of literature. Under his passionate and discerning spirit, texts (poems, short stories, play, novels) came alive in all their vivid detail, urgency, and illumination. The Speers teaching genius emerged from his earnest and unceasing commitment to understand, appreciate, and translate the courage, vision, tragedy, and comedy of the writers he taught. In this capacity, the greatest novelists, play writers, poets, and short story writers found the reader they most valued and celebrated: a person with an ever open and expanding heart and vision, a scholar who was humble, patient, discerning, and kind, a teacher who could make texts come alive for a new generation of readers. Will had teachers in his life who set his heart and mind on fire. Great teaching, his beloved prep school teacher exclaimed, is “like trembling,� and Will Speers set off to create that culture, that energy, that passion in every class he taught. By the power of his soul, spirit, and imagination, Will Speers decided that his teaching would be about creating passion, discovery, enlightenment, both because he wanted to honor great writers and great teachers who inspired him but also because he loved his students even more than the texts that fascinated him. Great teachers know that students possess wisdom, grace, and beauty in their hearts and souls, and they know that only through love, attention, enthusiasm, patience, and humility will the student open his soul to learning, to enlightenment, to engagement in the world. Will Speers is that teacher.
84
