The Table of Honor

One of my observations about the "special" school that I attended from the fourth through twelfth grades was the seeming coexistence of both a police state and anarchy there. An example is something that happened in the fourth grade (spring 1966) called the "Table of Honor". In this school, the philosophy, at least on the surface, was to nurture promising children toward higher academic achievement (and, so the theory went, eventual contributions to society that could help to beat those pesky Russians, who wanted to "bury" us). I don't think the teachers there were quite up to the task. They seemed to me more interested in maintaining order and discipline over the student body, although at other times they completely ignored individual students. Let me illustrate. During the second half of my fourth grade there (early 1966), the esteemed faculty decided to institute something call the "Table of Honor" whereby students would be awarded for their good behavior by being selected to sit at a special table at lunchtime. First you need to know that in our Multi-Purpose Room (our school was too special to call a cafeteria a cafeteria), the tables were of the large, long type you would see in the movie Escape From Alcatraz. So, at each table sat a good number of students. When all of the classrooms lined up to go to lunch, the "selected" got to go to the front of the line. Well, I was pretty much a quiet kid who didn't cause trouble for the teachers and stayed pretty much in the background. I had thought that I'd be a cinch for this great "honor", but didn't yet realize that the big shot professionals in charge were barely aware of my existence. So week after week went by and other students were selected while I was passed by. And some of them were obnoxious troublemakers! More and more tables were set aside for the Table of Honor that, by the time that I actually was selected, this section comprised about 40% of the entire cafeteria. Still, I felt oh so "honored" as I sat down to eat there. But I noticed that teachers were walking up and down the aisles with hawk-eyes ready to catch an "honor" student doing something improper, and then they'd be suddenly swept down upon by the teacher and told to immediately take their lunch and go to the tables "over there" (I guess that would be the Tables of Dishonor) where everybody else ate. Well, I made it there all right the first day until a friend of mine sitting across from me held up my brown lunch bag (with my garbage in it) and I started punching it like a boxer. Within seconds a vigilant teacher came up and kicked both of us off the Table of Honor. As I sat on the other side, back with the rest of the rabble, three other friends came over, having just been exiled for some other petty transgression. The weeks continued to pass until almost the entire cafeteria was the "Table of Honor" and I was one of the losers crowded into a little corner of tables! The irony is that I felt less scrutinized and freer to relax and be myself after I got kicked off.

Although the faculty acted like prison guards during lunchtime and other assemblies, at other times they seemed very detached and uninterested in the students they were supposed to be nurturing toward greatness. In class after class, I would just get up and wander around the school. Sometimes I would just hang out in the library (I liked the World Book Encyclopedia with its color pictures and glossy pages) and other times I'd wander the hallways or peek through windows and see what was going on in different classrooms. With this sort of disinterest on the teachers' part, it was inevitable that some mischief would occur. At some time late that year some dumb kid there told another dumb kid that he rubbed a penny back and forth over his arm for about a minute and it caused a pleasant, tingling sensation for a little bit (until it started hurting). This extremely weird self-mutilation fad spread quickly among some of the stupid boy students (this seemed to be a male thing) until I could scarcely go anywhere that I didn't see this going on or hear kids talking about their experiences doing this nonsense. Of course, although any fool who just walked around with their eyes open would have seen it, none of my teachers had a clue anything was going on. And they probably never would if the absolutely dumbest kid in the history of schools on this planet hadn't decided that if he used a coin with a serrated edge like a dime on his arm, then the sensation of pleasure would be magnified. In this way, he tore the skin on his arm into a bleeding mess and went crying to the school nursing station to get his arm bandaged and put into a sling. And of course, everything then came out in the open, including the names of arm-rubbing co-conspirators. The teachers were outraged! Those involved would have their parents notified, but worst of all, they were no longer allowed to eat at the Table of Honor! Ooh-noo, not the Table of Honor, too!!!

Doubtless, those responsible at my old school for coming up with this Table of Honor idea thought it was a resounding success. Maybe one of them wrote an academic journal article about it. The appropriate publication for it would have been Prison Quarterly!