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Wilderness Times | Summer 2021
CHAIR OF THE GOVERNING COUNCIL SPEECH DAY ADDRESS Good morning - my name is Shanti Berggren - I am the Chair of the Governing Council and I welcome you to the 2020 Senior School Speech Day. Today we come together to celebrate the achievements of our senior students and to formally congratulate and farewell the Year 12 class of 2020.
Shanti Berggren Chair of the Governing Council
It was Helen Keller who said ‘character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.’ Helen Keller lost her sight and her hearing when she was 19 months old. She was so frustrated by her inability to communicate that she would frequently fly into rages. Then, at 7 years old, Keller met her miracle teacher – 20 year old Anne Sullivan. Keller would later mark the day they met as the most significant moment in her life. At the beginning the young Helen Keller pinched and kicked her new teacher, and even knocked out one of her teeth but Sullivan persevered, patiently teaching Keller to use her hands to interpret and connect with the world. And so began a relationship between teacher and student that lasted 49 years and led to Helen Keller’s array of academic and literary achievements. It is appropriate that I open my address today with a true story demonstrating the life changing impact of a selfless teacher, of her dogged perseverance and an orientation to action. Those traits apply to every member of staff at Wilderness School. In 2020 the world changed at a breathtaking pace. The dislocation in our lives that started at the beginning
of this year and continues even now distorted our understanding of time, days felt like weeks and weeks felt like years. Systems, processes and communication cadences were superseded by a need to act quickly and decisively while operating with ambiguity and incomplete information. But everybody knows for true cool in a crisis you want a woman. Our Principal, her leadership team and her staff navigated a new landscape of hard decision landmines. They made a Herculean effort rethinking every aspect of their practice to move to an online education delivery model while maintaining Wilderness standards in the quality of teaching and learning. In the face of a global pandemic, they collectively resisted looking upstream at what was coming their way and instead focused downstream on the students who depended on them. It is the teachers at Wilderness School who have given so many of us a head start. We remain indebted to them for their labours and their kindness. We thank them all. Time spent in close quarters has nurtured families, friendships and communities. We came to appreciate the joys of being part of a tribe. In Jane Danvers, the tribe of Wilderness School has a leader that I want to anoint a Viking with a mother’s heart. Great leaders trust the people on their team and coach them well. They set clear vision and values and direct others to work according to those guiding principles. Jane is not simply best practice; she is leading practice in education and leadership. Because she is so clear about her ‘why’ the ‘how’ is something she translates easily to her tribe.
