A Woman of Her Word

Anna, my faculty mentor, was scrolling through the school's calendar and highlighting the events we rookie teachers must attend.

“Keep an eye out for the Honor Assembly,” she said, “they haven’t scheduled it yet, but it always falls on the first or second week of September.”

“And what’s the Honor Assembly?” I asked.

“A faculty member and a student speak about academic integrity, plagiarism, proper source citations. Two speeches that say the same thing: don't take shortcuts. Who knows if they'll listen, but we hope it sets a tone for the year. The student who addresses the assembly is nominated by the faculty, so that's kind of a big deal.”

“Charming,” I muttered, not meaning to say it out loud.

Anna raised her head up. “Charming? How’s it charming?” she asked.

“To hold an assembly for the entire school about academic integrity after ChatGPT has taken over seems, I don’t know, nostalgic.”

“You mean naive,” Anna said evenly.

Her candor made me feel emboldened. “I wonder what instructions the student speaker will give to her preferred AI service: HAL, write me a 300-word speech on academic integrity for an all-girls high school.”

Anna smiled, “Exactly…” but then paused, “...who or what is Hal?” probably worried that she wasn’t up on the latest platform.

“HAL 9000,” I clarified. “That was the AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“I didn’t see that movie. It came out in 2001?” she asked. I laughed, but then I realized Anna wasn’t kidding. I’m a new teacher, but I’m old.

On the day of the assembly, the English department chair was the faculty speaker. Xavier recounted a story in which he had lied to a referee at an intramural volleyball game. “‘Was the ball on the line or was it out?’ the ref asked me. It was out, but I confidently told him it was on the line. Mind you, this wasn’t the crushing pressure of Olympic competition. We were a bunch of college dudes impersonating athletes, and yet I succumbed to cheating.”

I appreciated Xavier’s candor (and for working in the word “succumbed”). He appeared genuinely ashamed, all these years later, that he had lied and lied for no good reason--a fitting cautionary tale.

Then Beatrice, the student speaker, took the stage. I didn’t know Beatrice well (she had been in my class less than a month at this point), but she had already impressed me. Beatrice was one of the few seniors who arrived prepared, on time, and eager to participate. Coincidentally, she was captain of the volleyball team with a reputation as a fierce but inflexibly honest competitor.

“When I was in middle school,” she began, “I worked hard to maintain my GPA, which was always in danger by Ms. Ryan’s infamous math quizzes. I had promised my eighth-grade self that I would slay the Algebra dragon and not vice-versa.” The students who had attended the same middle school nodded in solidarity.

“On this particular Monday,” she continued, “Ms. Ryan began passing out a quiz on variables. I was panic-stricken. I turned to my friend, Bella, and complained. ‘A pop quiz?! This isn’t fair.’ Bella told me it wasn’t a pop quiz and asked me if I had forgotten to study. Study? I didn't even know there was a quiz. This was a disaster.”

Halfway through the quiz, Beatrice admitted to the assembly that she had engineered a plan. “None of the questions looked familiar, so I started to sniffle. I asked Ms. Ryan if I could get a Kleenex. The Kleenex box was on the other side of the room, so I casually looked at Bella’s paper on the way there and casually looked at her paper on the way back. I thought it was a brilliant move and that I was perfectly sly.”

Beatrice gave the crowd time to react. Amidst the muffled laughter, Beatrice could tell that we knew what was coming next but still wanted to hear her tell it.

“When the bell rang, we turned in our quizzes and headed to recess. Ms. Ryan asked me to stay, so she could have a word with me.” The assembly gasped on cue. “My heart sank, but I was convinced there was no way she had figured out what I had done and would never accuse me because I had never done anything like this before.”

Beatrice let us sit with that image–the model student above suspicion standing in the dock. “But Ms. Ryan had noticed, so when I walked over to her desk, it was then that she dropped…” Beatrice leaned into the mic, “...the C-word.”

How can I adequately describe the crowd’s reaction except by pharmaceutical commercial? Upon hearing that a middle school math teacher called her student the unholy grail of misogynistic slurs, side effects may include insomnia, hair loss, changes in appetite, and mood swings. We didn’t gasp as before; it was more of a collective gag reflex, a physical manifestation of the cognitive dissonance now swamping our brains. She said WHAT?! An angry posse began taking shape.

A much bigger problem than academic integrity had just been exposed. True, Beatrice’s tissue-retrieval ruse, allowing her to glance at her neighbor’s quiz, did violate the Honor Code. But whoever this Ms. Ryan is, I don’t think she should be teaching children…or anyone.

Beatrice was unprepared for the squall of reaction that had overtaken her audience. She hesitated to continue. If I read Beatrice’s expression correctly, she was wondering if the crowd had turned on her. Had she overshared? Were her classmates really this appalled by her moral lapse from four years ago? Several faculty members were trying to shush the students; things were getting out of hand.

“Cheater!” Beatrice blurted into the mic, talking over the noise. “Ms. Ryan called me something I had never been called before or since. Cheater.”

We all froze, our outrage now turned to bewilderment; everyone rapt in the same thought process. Cheater?! She called you a cheater? Wait, do you think the C-word is the polite way of saying cheater? Can Beatrice be that sheltered, bless her heart? Yes, just look at her starting to flail up there, perplexed as to how to carry on, and yet rushing to the end of her speech so that this – whatever this is – will be over soon. I don’t remember her conclusion. I doubt any of us had the wherewithal to focus on that portion of her talk.

Anna was right; a tone had been set by this assembly.

At some point, all of us have misunderstood a turn of phrase, an idiom, or a euphemism, but it generally happens at the dinner table or in the carpool ride home, and our friends and family never let us forget it. Quite a way for Beatrice to find out what “the C-word” actually refers to. Someone must have…no, dozens of people must have been tripping over each other to enlighten her ASAP after she left the stage.

I’m told every graduating class has a seminal event that comes to define their senior year. So, for Beatrice’s sake, I hope a meteor crashes into the quad next month, injuring no one but providing a welcome change of subject.

Whatever else we can say about this year’s Honor Assembly, it’s clear that Beatrice didn’t use AI to write her speech. She may have lost some of her innocence that day; I hope she never loses her integrity.