 At the bend in Stonehedge Road stands a white house with Abbot blue shutters and overgrown hydrangeas. There, like the mythical beast Cerberus, a Labrador retriever named Maeve stands sentinel as her canine predecessor, the late Grace O’Malley, did before her. Once you’ve earned Maeve’s trust, you are welcomed into a world inhabited by the quintessential teacher, Jean St. Pierre. Her dining room table is piled high with student papers in various stages of consideration, each marked with both corrections and encouragement in an English teacher’s shorthand. You then enter the pantry, where teacups and crystal goblets invite the visitor for rich conversation and thoughtful engagement in what it is to be. Next comes the chaotic kitchen, too small for Jean’s expansive culinary undertakings and cluttered with totems past and present: the windowsill with ceramic yellow Labs, a flickering votive for her Irish mother, the refrigerator covered with photos of her seven godchildren and her former students. It’s this kitchen that produces scrambled eggs for her Man and God class breakfasts, boeuf bourguignon for the annual neighborhood tree-trimming fete, peppermint ice cream pies for her advisees and lasagna for cast parties.
We continue into the study, where Celtic tunes compete with the sounds of National Public Radio that fuel the English teacher’s passion for politics. There are piles of books: plays, poetry and the classics—dog-eared, marked and remarked—from which Jean has taught for 41 years, first at Abbot and later at Phillips Academy. There are also British mysteries for moments stolen away from schoolwork and from her more serious dwelling in true literature. Next is the living room, always with flowers on the mantle. This is the space often filled with voices during one of Jean’s wine and cheese soirees. Visiting writers from Alfred Kazin to Gloria Naylor, from Allen Ginsburg to Gwendolyn Brooks have sat in this parlor after campus events along with Jean’s own former student and English department colleague Julia Alvarez ’67. Retired English teacher Tom Regan ’51 recalls these gatherings fondly, saying, “The strength of our department is the creative individualism of its members, so strong that a kind of centrifugal force tempts us to go off on our own in all kinds of directions. Jean held us together.”
What brought Jean to Abbot? Jean says, “When I was a child growing up in Lowell, my family’s Sunday drives frequently took us to Andover, where we would drive by Abbot Academy. ... I remember reading on the Abbot Gates the words Enter into understanding that you may go forth to nobler living, and I knew this as a place where I would like to be.”
In 1963 she indeed entered those gates, not as a student but as a new teacher, fresh from nurturing her love of literature at Wheaton College and then at Columbia, where she earned a master’s degree. She entered the Abbot Circle when the womb-like school needed her passion and her spunk to energize its classrooms. She inspired a decade of Abbot girls to read literature in ways not thought possible. Jean cared deeply about Abbot—everything from teaspoons to curriculum. She still does and will continue to. Witness her long tenure as a member of the Abbot Academy Association and her service on its board of directors and that of the Brace Center for Gender Studies, which now occupies part of Abbot Hall.
At the time of the Phillips-Abbot Academy merger in 1973, Jean was finishing a five-year term as chair of Abbot’s English department. Tom Regan remembers Jean as “an angel of mercy, the personification of coun-seling, consoling and cooperation” during those turbulent times as the two schools struggled to become one. |
“I remember reading on the Abbot Gates
the words Enter into understanding
that you may go forth to nobler living,
and I knew this as a place where
I would like to be.”
—Jean St. Pierre |
Bulfinch Hall became home to Jean when she moved up the hill to take her place among some of Andover’s legendary English teachers. Within a decade she became the first female chair of the department and a legendary teacher herself. She loved teaching at both ends of a student’s career. With juniors, she joined their journey at the outset with such texts as The Odyssey and The Catcher in the Rye and patiently read their individual journals, filled with references to homesickness, youthful secrets and quandaries about belonging in this new place. Her capstone course, Man and God, never lacked for seniors vying for a chance to sit in her classroom. Unlikely personalities found links to each other’s humanity when they delved into a text with Jean. Her classroom held a kind of magic that both inspired and comforted while asking students to do extraordinary work.
In the last half of her teaching years, Jean was drawn to the theatre. She directed a score of plays in myriad venues: the old George Washington Hall theatre, the basement of Taylor Hall, the drama lab, the Steinbach Theatre and finally the Tang Theatre. It was in the Tang that she most recently directed her second Hamlet in 20 years in collaboration with theatre department colleague Kevin Heelan. Her choices ranged from Alan Ayckbourn to August Wilson and included such old chestnuts as Arsenic and Old Lace and All My Sons. A Lewis Carroll aficionado, Jean delighted in playing the Queen of Hearts in a student-directed adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, where she got to speak a favorite line, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” This, fittingly, from a woman who begins each day at 6 o’clock with a puppy play group followed by laps in the swimming pool and who refuses to listen to a student who says, “I can’t.”
Jean loves Shakespeare. She notes that it has been “heartening and thrilling to complete years of teaching by directing this latest production of Hamlet.” As for the Bard of Avon himself, Jean muses, “After 400 years, the immediacy of his plays still speaks to the human condition and sustains an English teacher for a lifetime.”
Jean St. Pierre has sustained so many of us over the years—faculty friends and colleagues, loyal staff, worried parents, Abbot alumnae—but most of all her students. She has given them the gift that teaching literature gives to human understanding. She will retire to Cape Cod; we shall miss her dearly. |
| ’Cilla Bonney-Smith is Phillips Academy’s associate dean of students and a psychological counselor. |
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