I was a child who flourished in school. I adored my teachers because they approved of me and encouraged me to express my ideas. Indeed, in the classroom I felt like a queen. I did, that is, until I was forced to deal with my seventh grade teacher.

Her name was Helen Fox. She was the stereotype of the old maid schoolmarm: strict, uncompromising, and often cruel in her criticism of the children she instructed. She prided herself on her inflexible discipline. “A rule is a rule,” she would say. “That’s the way it is in life and the way it will be in this classroom.”

She believed that because those rules were the painful boundaries that hemmed in her life. She was not an attractive woman, nor did she try to be. She wore the same tailored skirt and red jacket every day she appeared in the classroom and when she taught at my Sunday School. She pulled her black, obviously dyed hair into a severe bun at the nape of her neck and wore sensible lace-up oxfords. She was plagued with allergies and when she wasn’t pronouncing historical sequences for us to memorize, she was sneezing, coughing and blowing her nose with great, often alarming vigor.

There was not a vestige of softness about her. I could not imagine her ever caressing a child’s head with love as my third grade teacher always did, or greeting any human being with a smile so warm you unbuttoned your sweater as our kindergarten teacher did whenever she saw any of us in the halls, on the street or at an ice cream parlor.

Helen Fox felt trapped by a society that closed too many doors to women. I could never please her because she resented my enthusiasm and I suspect that my very fear angered her. She had none of my opportunities and she had managed very well. Why couldn’t I?

The principal of Fulton School was Susan Godfrey, also a spinster, but one who enjoyed the freedom of a single woman even in the early forties. Her posture was so erect she looked as if a yardstick was glued to her back, but none of us could doubt how much she cared about each one of us. On one humiliating occasion, when Miss Fox sent me to the office for whispering, I was forced to sit on the naughty bench with a cluster of children who threw spitballs, fought with each other at recess and stole pencils in the coatroom. Miss Godfrey emerged from her office and beckoned me to come into her room. I followed her, tears of shame streaming down my face. She walked over to me and took my hands in hers. “Lynn Ruth,” she said. “Throughout your life, you will meet people so wrapped up in their own pain that they don’t recognize the special gifts of those around them. You will often be falsely punished and, just as often, you will follow all the rules and fail in the result because your judge doesn’t want you to succeed. When this happens, my dear, you must force yourself to feel compassion for the person who seems to be your enemy.”

She paused for a moment and handed me a tissue. “Now dry your eyes and go back to your classroom.”

I nodded and turned to leave the office but she put a hand on my shoulder. “Sometimes, we don’t understand what we do to anger others because the problem is not in our behavior but in their expectations.”

Miss Fox taught us speech on Friday afternoons. I lived in agony that I would say something wrong and she would chastise me in front of the entire class. It seemed like Monday through Thursday vanished like the wind and I was faced with the torture of knowing I must perform for a woman who didn’t like me just moments after I had survived my last poor performance. However, after Miss Godfrey’s little talk, I began to look for things about my teacher that made her human. Miss Godfrey had hinted that my relationship with this stern woman was soured by something inside Miss Fox and I tried to figure out what that problem was. As I trudged home that afternoon trying to find a suitable topic for my speech, I thought about all the idiosyncrasies that set Helen Fox apart from the other teachers. There was her dress, of course and her inability to smile. There were her allergies and her sense that no one ever understood what she was trying to teach. There was her unbending posture and the way she paced in front of the room like an expectant father. And, as I thought about these characteristics, I got my great idea. I would incorporate all her idiosyncrasies into my speech the next day and call it HOW NOT TO GIVE A SPEECH.

I stood in front of the class the next day, my hair pulled back into a bun, wearing a red jacket, a navy blue skirt and very large lace-up oxfords. I held a Kleenex box in my hand. I cleared my throat several times and I began to cough and sneeze. I paced up and down before the class and I announced, “A rule is a rule. That’s the way it is in life and the way it will be in this classroom.”

Then I blew my nose. I frowned at my giggling classmates and said, “When you laugh and whisper you are not learning. You are wasting my time!”

I shook my finger at the class and then I sneezed so violently the papers on my podium scattered across the floor. I looked over at Miss Fox, expecting to be sent down to Miss Godfrey again, and I relaxed.

She was laughing.

Miss Fox put her arm around my shoulder and actually smiled. “A sense of humor is the only weapon you will ever need in life, Lynn Ruth,” she said. “I have never been able to abide people who take themselves too seriously.”

Miss Fox and I both saw our relationship in a new light after my speech when I had put myself in her shoes. I realized that part of her impatience was caused by allergies that made her nose run, her head ache and her throat hurt all the time. I also saw that my sense of tragedy when I gave a wrong answer made my teacher think I was a fawning and weak. For her part, she began to allow a few ink smudges on my papers. “What’s a little blot among friends?” she’d say and we both would laugh.

I learned a very important lesson that day and I offer it to you now: No matter how much you fear your enemy, he will become your friend, once you share a good laugh.