"To Fraulein Wenckebach as a teacher, I owe more than to any other
teacher I ever had. I cannot remember that she reproved any
student or that she ever directly urged us to do our best. She
made no efforts to make her lectures attractive by witticisms,
anecdotes, or entertaining illustrations. Yet her students worked
with eager faithfulness, and I, personally, have never been so
absorbed and inspired by any lectures as by hers. The secret of
her power was not merely that she was master of the art of teaching
and knew how to arouse interest and awaken the mind to independent
thought and inquiry, but that her own earnestness and high purpose
touched our lives and made anything less than the highest possible
degree of effort and attainment seem not worth while."--"We girls
used to say to each other that if we ever taught we should want
to be to our students what she was to us, and if they could feel
as we felt toward her and her work we should want no more. She
demanded the best of us, without demanding, and what she gave us
was beyond measure.--It was courses like hers that made us feel
that college work was the best part of college life."

These are the things that teachers care most to hear, and in the
nineteen years of her service at Wellesley, there were many students
eager to tell her what she had been to them. She writes in 1886:
"What a privilege to pour into the receptive mind of young American
girls the fullness of all that is precious about the German spirit;
and how enthusiastically they receive all I can give them!"

In the late eighties and early nineties there came to the college
a notable group of younger women, destined to play an important
part in Wellesley's life and to increase her academic reputation: