15
ON MY HONOR as a former Tar, I swear that I will not shirk from shouldering whatever share of the responsibility for the downfall of the Tars I should shoulder. A Tar stands tall, after all, and doesn’t pass the buck. However, I’m not going to be reticent about Mr. Summers’s part in the collapse, either. After all, a Tar is nobody’s patsy and doesn’t get stuck holding the bag.
Pledged as I now am to a full, fair, and frank disclosure, I’m forced to say that Mr. Summers deserves all the blame, since even the blame for my small mutiny must ultimately be laid at his feet.
I WAS NOT the only Tar who decided that he had had just about enough when Mr. Summers introduced the metallic ranks. The original Tars ranks ran from Commodore at the top down through Admiral, Captain, Lieutenant, Ensign, Petty Officer, Seaman, and Bayman, to Swabby at the bottom. When Mr. Summers introduced the notion that a Tar could be “of the First Water” within his rank, none of us minded. It gave us something new to shoot for. A kid who couldn’t meet—or even keep track of—the shifting requirements for advancing from, say, Petty Officer to Ensign could at least aspire to becoming a Petty Officer of the First Water. From my vantage in front of the Tars during the rehearsal period, watching when they took the floor by rank, I may have been the only person other than Mr. Summers and Robby who noticed (and I doubt that Robby noticed much of anything, come to think of it) that only a heavier-than-average Tar ever advanced into the upper ranks, and that within each rank only the chubbiest were ever recognized as being of the first water.
Then Mr. Summers introduced a parallel ranking of metals, from Gold at the top down through Silver, Platinum, Copper, Aluminum, Iron, Lead, and Zinc, to Tin at the bottom, which could be added, he claimed, to any of the regular Tars ranks and even combined with “of the First Water.” There was some grumbling at first over the confusion introduced along with the new ranks, but this subsided after a while, after we had tried the sound of some of the names of metals with the ranks we bore and found that they had a nice ring to them. Some were especially plangent. I was taken with the sound of “Aluminum Commodore of the First Water Leroy,” and I immediately aspired to it.
Soon, however, I saw the truth. The metallic ranks merely reinforced the policy of fat favoritism I’d seen in the basic ranks. No lowly, skinny Swabby ever became a Gold or Silver Swabby; none ever got beyond Lead, and there were lots of thin Tins. No exalted, overstuffed Commodore or Admiral was ranked lower than Aluminum. Mr. Summers referred to Tars of the topmost ranks as the Precious Metals, and during rehearsals he skimmed these boys, the shortest and fattest of the Tars, from the ranks at large, and, shouldering his Ping-Pong bazooka, marched them off to the coach’s office for private instruction in leadership, navigation, esprit de corps, and humility.
The beginning of the end, that important point in any history, a point apparent only in retrospect, came when something occurred that was simply mystifying at first: just as I was about to begin the rehearsal one Thursday night, the door of the coach’s office opened and Robby Haskins walked out, silent and glassy-eyed. He walked across the floor and into the bleachers. He sat there among the rest of the Tars. Mr. Summers said nothing when he emerged with the Precious Metals, but it was clear to all of us that for some reason Robby had been demoted in fact if not in rank. He took the floor with the Swabbies. Though he still wore the uniform of a Commodore, it hung on him like a hand-me-down from an older, fatter brother.
Others of the Precious Metals took over Robby’s duties. When Mr. Summers took to the floor at the beginning of a meeting now, he was surrounded by a swarm of short, fat Tars. He had one short, fat Tar to carry his note cards, another to hold the box of medals and pins that he was going to award, another to carry his ballpoint pen, and so on.
Later, at the trial, Mr. Summers asserted that he had established the Precious Metals as an experiment, because he’d seen that a system of ranks and privileges gave him a means for gaining the undivided attention of boys who, when they sat in his science classroom, often stared out the windows for long periods of time and paid no attention to him at all. He had, he claimed, developed a theory that he could, by using a hierarchy like that of the Tars as a system of rewards and punishments, accomplish something that he had begun to despair of ever accomplishing inside his science classroom: actually teaching something that the children in his charge would remember. To test it on a small scale, he had chosen a group of Tars by weight and set out to teach them humility. He had, he said, tried to explain his theory and methods to some of the other teachers, but they had pooh-poohed it. Several had, he complained, not merely ridiculed his ideas, but had suggested to him, with leers and chuckles, that his theory was nothing but a pederast’s cloak.
In Topical Guide 229, Mark Dorset considers Education: Role of Rewards and Punishments in from this episode.
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🎧 229: On my honor ...