There’s an old saying, usually uttered by those in great shape to those in terrible shape during a crisis: “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

I’m thinking here of Margaret Humphrey.

My second grade teacher not only didn’t kill me, although one of my ears is noticeably larger than the other, she made me stringer.

How, you ask, all agog.

Well, she made us suffering second graders who had experienced a little difficulty learning to read in first grade sit perfectly still and listen to hours upon hours of phonics. We were miserable. Couldn’t move, couldn’t squirm, and surely couldn’t complain. And to top it off, these phonics lessons, played on large vinyl (or steel!) record albums, were usually inflicted upon us after lunch, so we couldn’t sleep either, although I do remember Thomas Jernigan and Paulette Ward nodding off one time. ONE time!

Miss Humphrey would play the records and we would recite the sounds that the sadistic man on the recordings would utter, most of which weren’t even human. More like dolphin noises.

This would go on for hours upon end, an eternity to a second grade prisoner of war. These lessons droned on in the heat and the silence for literally all eternity. We were doomed.

We were also not allowed to laugh in Miss Humphrey’s class, which was a rule usually not very hard to disobey, there was little mirth in there I can tell you. Miss Humphrey was all business and was determined to teach us to read using the scientific breakthrough of phonics. But one, time, I can clearly remember Ray Eddings reading a passage aloud, about a trip to a farm. One of the lines went something like this: Miss Brown lived down a pretty lane and kept a very tidy farm.” Except that Ray did not pronounce the word “tidy” with a long e. He pronounced it with a short e, and we straitlaced children heard, in Miss Humphrey’s second grade class, one of those taboo words that children aren’t ever supposed to know or hear.

We wanted to explode with laughter. But not one of us did. How we suppressed the natural instinct to giggle I will never know, but I suspect that Miss Humphrey bearing down upon Ray, in her starched cotton, shirt waist dress and high belt, looking ever so much like a steamboat, did the trick. We dared not laugh and we didn’t, until the end of the school day, and then we just fell about the place.

Evidently Ray had not been paying attention to his phonics, but luckily I was, although I was totally unaware of doing this at the time. I thought then that I was already in a place that the Sunday preached often predicted that we would go when we died, and that place was neither pretty nor tidy.

But I was listening and I was learning, albeit against my will. I could see and hear other children in other classes outside playing while we were being systematically tortured daily—and after lunch, for Pete’s sake.

I did not enjoy the lessons in phonics, but somehow I knew that they were intended to help me—at least that was what Miss Humphrey rather kindly placed into my head. So I made a game out of the phonics lessons, in which I tried my very best to repeat those dolphin sounds perfectly. Didn’t work, of course, but it did make the lessons at least a little more endurable.

Of course, while I was endlessly repeating the noises coming from that large instrument of terror, I was also imagining them as farm animal sounds, so dolphin sounds often became donkey sounds or goat sounds in my head.

If only Miss Humphrey could have surmised what I was imagining, both of my ears would be much, much larger today.

But I played along with the recordings, and they did have an effect other than threatening my sanity. The phonics did improve my reading ability. By the end of second grade I could read anything, including my eldest sister’s text books. I could even pronounce the word “tidy.”

Years later, when I was studying French in college (which, considering that I now live in San Pablo, was a wonderful language to study), my professor commented one time that I could duplicate any sound in the French language, which he found remarkable for a rural kid. I could even roll my r’s and trill.

He asked me then if I had ever studied phonics, and I replied that I had many years before. He said, “phonics paid off. You have a natural ability to learn the French language.” (I made six A’s and only one B in my French courses!)

So, thank you, Margaret Humphrey. You helped me out in college and in my ability to read and to love reading.

And this only goes to prove that that old adage is absolutely true: that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, although I’m not so sure Ray Eddings would agree.