Sarah Wehle, Classics Department and Senior Administration, 1977–2024

I taught English here for 34 years and retired nine years ago. Facts about me would be impertinent this afternoon except in this respect: When I arrived on Center Street in 1981, a young woman named Sarah Wehle had already been working at Milton for four years. I labored through what I thought was a pretty extensive stint, but now when I return after nine years of happily putting my feet up, I find that Sarah still has her shoulder to the wheel. As a matter of fact, I imagine she’ll be reading over some of your advisor letters later this week, so please, in addition to saying something substantive and encouraging about each of your charges, make sure that all the sentence subjects agree with their verbs as they should do in English as well as in Latin and Greek.

One of the things that has made Sarah a great administrator for so long, one of the things we love and admire about her is the scope of her attention, which runs all the way from big school policy issues to the tiniest anxious freshmen whimpering in the corner of the dormitory common room and on down, yes, to subject-verb agreement.

Sarah certainly gets a blue ribbon for durability and another for her sense of duty. Her talent as an administrator was inversely proportional to her ambition to be one. She would’ve much preferred to be sitting down with a dozen kids working through the Aeneid, but when the school came knocking on her door, she always felt compelled to say yes. When I asked her if she had held every administrative position Milton has to inflict on a person, she was quick to deny—perhaps only because so many new ones have been created. Give her another decade, and she’d probably run the table.

Some of her roles have changed names more than once since she first took them on. She has at various times been chair of the Classics Department, head class advisor or class dean, director of studies, dean of studies, academic dean, Upper School principal, and dean of faculty. A commonality running through her tenure in each of these has been her steady hand of the helm, a combination of unflappable, good sense and generous goodwill. When she ran Monday morning assembly as principal, her parting words as we trooped off to start the week were invariably “be kind.” They may not have ushered in a benign utopia, but they set a bar that we could at least aspire to clear as we went about our work, knowing that we could count on Sarah to be kind to us.

The work we went about was the work she always wished she could be pursuing full-time, teaching and learning in the classroom. Though I was lucky enough to teach two out of Sarah’s three wonderful sons. I never saw one of her own classes. My good friend and colleague, Caroline Sabin saw a lot of that because both she and her daughter had Sarah as a teacher. She’s going to complete this farewell picture by telling you what that experience was like.

David Smith
Former English Department Faculty Member

Thank you David. And hello everyone. It’s really an honor to be able to celebrate Sarah’s teaching. I first met Sarah when I was 14, a freshman in her Latin one class. She told us that she was Athena and we more than half believed her. Forty-two years later we still talk about her class and here are the phrases that we use: Equally formidable and inspiring. Joyfully serious, those eyes saw all.

Our stories mentioned hard work, but lots of fun too. Most of all, they extoll our devotion to the course because of our devotion to Sarah. She held us in thrall. I later found out that you don’t have to be 14 to feel that way. A few years ago, an English Department colleague who had begun the morning, unhappy about losing a day with his students in order to watch others teach, expressed his gratitude for what he called the masterclass in teaching that he received by observing just 20 minutes of Sarah at work. And when my husband found himself with a free period on parents’ day, he asked if Sarah was teaching during that block. He didn’t care if our daughter was in the course or not. He just could never get enough of Sarah’s lightning-quick pace and wit. He often said that Milton should cycle all prospective families through Sarah’s class. He believed that the chance that one’s child could be in a classroom so electric would convince any parent to apply.

I also learned later exactly what David was talking about, how great a role of kindness plays in Sarah’s teaching. I experienced it as a young teacher at Milton when Sarah went out of her way to encourage me. I experienced it as an advisor hearing Sarah speak about her students with insight, compassion, and wisdom, and I experienced it as a parent. My daughter loves Sarah’s class in the same way that I had—and by the way, she also wonders about the Athena thing. She also found a perceptive and caring supporter in Sarah. Sarah went well beyond the role of Latin teacher to notice my daughter’s emotional vulnerabilities and convince her to address them, as she has done for so many students. To me, that’s Sarah’s greatest gift to Milton, the model she provided for balancing caring about students with caring about scholarship. So please join me and David in saying thanks to our green-eyed goddess for the 47 years she spent down here among the mortals.

Caroline Sabin ’86
Former English Department Chair