by Coco Shepard ’27
May 2025
Dr. Ann Wheeler has been teaching English at USN since 1985, as well as taking on other important duties as a Judicial Board advisor, faculty sponsor of the Feminism Club, and an English department chair.
As the end of the school year approaches, we start to turn towards departing faculty and staff for their last words of wisdom towards the USN community. In a short interview, Wheeler recounted memories from the start of her teaching career and gave advice to USN students as well as new teachers.
Wheeler had a hard time deciding what her favorite part of USN was, but chose the relationship between students and teachers.
“I love the informality of relationships between teachers and students,” she said. “I mean, it’s school, and the teachers are grown ups, and the students are on their way to becoming grown ups, but we’ve always treated each other like people who respect each other and like each other and have a good time with each other. And so I hope that never changes.”
Her favorite author to teach is Virginia Woolf. She mentioned that “the most recent one [of her books] I’ve taught is Mrs. Dalloway, but I’ve taught other books, and I think that she’s got really interesting ideas. I love talking about them with students, that’s always fun for me.”
To new teachers at USN, Wheeler gives an important piece of advice.
“Relax. It’s hard being you. And you know, I think that the very informality I love can be one of the things that makes it hard to be new, figuring out what your role is and how you relate to students.””
She also wants new USN teachers to recognize the uniqueness of USN students.
“Every once in a while, USN students are difficult. I don’t think they’re difficult in a bad way, but you know, [students] are thinkers, and [they] want to know why, and [they] can be challenging in all kinds of good ways. It can be hard to get used to being a teacher. Relax. It’s all going to be fine.”
A memorable moment Wheeler recounted was from her first year teaching, reminding her how much USN students have changed and stayed the same in some ways.
“I was very unprepared for what teaching at USN would be like. I hadn’t really been in a high school since I was a high school student. The class of 1985 was difficult for all the reasons that I just said about being challenging and all those things. So, you know, I walked in and they didn’t tell me their right names, they told me different names, and I was just left, just kind of thinking, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ But it was fun, and they were fun, and eventually I relaxed.”
The best change Wheeler has seen during her time at USN was “air conditioning. I came to this building and it was not air conditioned.” She recalled. “I mean, that goes way back, and there are certainly other changes that have more to do with the population, but air conditioning in this building, when I think of my first year, that’s big.”
Wheeler told another funny story about her first class of students.
“They decided that they would play a practical joke on me, an extended, long lasting practical joke. So I was this prim and proper new PhD, and they went to The Great Escape and bought boxes and boxes of Harlequin romance novels and wrote my name on them and started just leaving them around the school as if they were my books. At this point, it was typewriters and not computers that people used. So I was using it for the handouts I gave out in class. I was using an IBM Selectric typewriter and had a really distinctive font. They found another one with that really distinctive font. They typed a note donating the books to the library in my name. It was funny, and, you know, it ended up being a thing that kind of bonded me to that class [of 1985].”
To USN students and other young people, she recommends the book Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.
“There are so, so, so many books, and everybody, everybody is hard. Ask me another day, and I might give you another answer, but this is what I’m going to say. I think [Song of Solomon] says a lot about what it means to be American. I think it says a lot about searching for identities. I think it says a lot about complicated families. I think that no matter who you are, you can probably find a way into that book. Yeah, and it’s still taught in junior year.”
During her 40 years at USN, Dr. Wheeler has impacted thousands of students and faculty that will miss her dearly. She’s been a part of the USN community for so long that it’s hard to imagine our school without her. We’ll say our goodbyes at the end of the school year with heavy hearts and fond memories. We all hope that she’ll keep in touch and will always be welcome in our halls.
