The Girl Rule

“Jason Ellesby, is the diagram in question seventeen an equilateral or isosceles triangle?”

Eyes glued to his tablet, Jason tapped furiously at the virtual keyboard.

The teacher-bot's LED eyes flickered off, its feminine voice replaced by a gritty male one. “That’s correct, Jason. You are an excellent student.”

"He didn't answer the question," a girl in the front row complained, turning to Jason. “You hacked the teacher-bot again, didn’t you?”

Pavel Tsaernov, seated to Jason's right, slapped him on the back. “My man has mad skills. He doesn’t need to answer questions.”

In a back corner of the classroom, Kerri Chandrasekhar’s fingers were a blur of tapping and swiping on her tablet’s screen. She stopped abruptly, glancing at the teacher-bot.

The teacher-bots’ eyes flickered. “Pavel, given two angles of 52 degrees, how many degrees is the third angle in an isosceles triangle?”

Eyes darting around the room, Pavel squeaked, “Um….52?”

“Incorrect. The correct response is--” The teacher-bot’s volume jumped ten decibels. “Stop being a dweeb.”

Ears turned crimson red, Pavel hissed through gritted teeth, “It’s Kerri. Take her down, Jason.”

Jason glanced at Kerri, a wicked grin creasing his face. A few keyboard strokes later, the teacher-bot’s eyes flickered. The robotic male voice stated, “Girls, write a twenty-page book report. Boys are on free time.”

The boys hooted and hollered.

Teacher-bot’s eyes strobed red and white. A flat robotic voice emanated from the speaker grill. “Error. Disregard previous communication.”

Its eyes stopped strobing. The default feminine voice said, “Students, continue to read along in your e-textbooks.”

Half rising from his chair, Pavel waved his hand. “Teacher, I have a question about something in my e-textbook.”

Yesterday, Pavel thought it'd be funny to toss chewed bubblegum under the teacher-bot's wheel. Now, every time it moved, the tire went shtick-shtick as it rolled over the smeared remains. The bot maneuvered between rows of chairs to Pavel’s seat. Its torso teetered as it compensated for the abrupt stop. “What is your question?”

Jason spoke up for the first time during the battle for control of the teacher-bot. “He wants to know.” He paused and looked directly at Kerri. “How can you control a teacher-bot without a wireless network connection?” With a flourish, he pressed the Enter key. The network uplink LED on all the student tablets turned from green to amber.

A boy seated behind him noticed the streaming video feed to his hamster cage at home went dark. “Did you just disable the classroom Wi-Fi?”

Kerri tapped away on her tablet. No response. The Wi-Fi signal was still present, but access was denied. Chewing her bottom lip, she mulled over her next move. Kerri rolled her eyes and exclaimed, “Boys and their annoying parlor tricks.” In a commanding voice, she said, “Teacher-bot, execute command: Girls Rule!”

The teacher-bot's LED eyes pulsed on and off. Its spindly Chromalloy arms shot out in a blur. The left, a rubber-tipped three-fingered claw, seized Pavel’s tablet from his desk. The right arm yanked Jason’s tablet from his hands so fast it knocked the stylus from his hand.

In a disapproving matronly voice, it said, “You can have these back after you write, ‘Girls rule, boys drool’ twenty times on the whiteboard.”

Pavel whined, “But, I didn’t do anything.”

The teacher-bot replied, “A disciplinary decision has been made. You may register a complaint to the principal – after you complete the assigned task.”

Heads low, the boys trudged to the whiteboard, avoiding the gaze of their classmates. Acting like men condemned, they started writing.

Pavel, at half Jason's height, craned his neck to look up at Jason. “How’d she do that?”

Staring at the whiteboard, Jason replied, “Obviously, she found a way to modify the behavioral sub-routines.”

“We gotta do something like that to get back at her.”

Jason threw a critical sideways glance that said, ‘We who?’ He whispered, “I don’t know how to access behavioral subroutines.” A little louder and laced with sarcasm, he continued, “Unless, you know how to break the encoding.”

Shoulders slumped, Pavel concentrated on filling his half of the whiteboard, wincing with every squeak of the marker.

Meanwhile, the teacher-bot followed its altered programming and delivered the boys’ tablets to Kerri. Their console sessions were still open and active. She scrolled through the command history, and undid Jason's changes to the wireless network, then reset the password to the default to prevent discovery by the school administrators. In a final act of humiliation, she modified the settings on both tablets to require a password from her to run or install apps not approved by the school.

The boys finished writing and shuffled back to their seats. They slumped down, arms crossed and glowered at the empty surface of their desk. Kerri handed the tablets to the teacher-bot to return them. Jason logged into his tablet and soon faced an administrative password prompt. He stared daggers at Kerri.

Kerri beamed an exaggerated friendly smile back at them. “Boys drool,” she commanded.

The teacher-bot spun around and wheeled to the front of the classroom. Its head rotated down. The classroom went quiet as the ever-present whine of servos ceased for the reboot cycle. Seconds later, the whine resumed, and its head lifted upright. “Good day class. Today’s Geometry lesson is….”