Class, Coffee, & Confrontation

Class, Coffee, & Confrontation by Stef Aden 

Working under an egotistical leader who places blame for all that is wrong on everyone else. Watching as change is enacted just to shake up the status quo. Seeing the results of a world where facts don’t matter to those in power. Questioning how far seasoned veterans need to go to oppose a leader and at what point extreme behavior to do so might be justified.

Sound familiar? Maybe political? Could this occur in what was once considered a haven for freedom and debate?

Class, Coffee, & Confrontation takes you inside Bantamville South High where Kassi Stanton, an English/Language Arts teacher for twenty years, struggles with forces that make her question her place in the field of teaching.

First, she faces a devious, bullying new principal interested in her own self-promotion and image-building who overemphasizes standardized test preparation, high test scores, and school rankings over all else. Second, her school is victimized by someone making bomb threats, and arming teachers is promoted as a possible safety measure to guard against violent intruders. Third, she suspects a colleague she has mentored and befriended is supplying the principal with information to use against her.

Pushed to do something, she recognizes connections between her real world and the literary world of fiction and tries to capitalize on them. Unforgettable characters and events in lit class favorites The Odyssey, Romeo and Juliet, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, and others inspire a ruse to take down her principal in front of the school board, identify the terrorist making the bomb threats, and tie the suspected team member to the information leaks.

It all adds up to one eye-opening school year to be experienced one sip at a time!

Class, Coffee, & Confrontation by Stef Aden 

Working under an egotistical leader who places blame for all that is wrong on everyone else. Watching as change is enacted to shake up the status quo. Seeing the results of a world where facts don’t matter. Experienced veterans questioning how far to go to oppose the leader and when extreme behavior might be justified.

Sound familiar? Political? Could this occur in what was once a haven for freedom and debate?

Class, Coffee, & Confrontation takes you inside Bantamville South High where Kassi Stanton, veteran English/Language Arts teacher, struggles with forces that threaten to take down her and public education. The terror of a recurring nightmare before the first day of school is amped up this year when new principal Rikki Parks, with a questionable past in other schools, takes the helm of BS High. A bomb threat, a concerned newspaper photographer, and a love triangle fill out the first week of school.

The story follows Kassi as she grapples with these three elements. She teaches students in a school system where data has a higher priority than learning and in a culture where terrorism in the form of bomb threats intrudes on the school building, once considered a safe place. She navigates relationships with colleagues who run the gamut from supportive friends to self-absorbed opportunists. And she deals with administrators who are threatening, incompetent, or both.

A series of issues lead Kassi to question remaining in teaching. The local SWAT team questions the school’s safety procedures as being counterproductive. During a meeting discussing the weaknesses of the program, one teacher suggests arming the staff. A principal waves her carte blanche from the school board to threaten her staff with transfer or termination if they do not cooperate with her ideas for raising the school’s ranking. Romantic relationships and break-ups among members of her own team entangle Kassi, and a confusing relationship of her own makes her the victim of a friend she tries to help.

The conflicts ramp up when bomb threats are made on three different occasions. As Principal Parks continues to create an environment of fear, Kassi sees similarities to characters in literature like Odysseus and Cyclops in The Odyssey. She steps forward to question the administrator’s treatment of her staff and suggest she is deflating the morale and confidence of new and veteran teachers by ignoring facts. When Parks leaves pink slips in the mailboxes of all nontenured teachers on the day they return from Spring Break, Kassi struggles with a dilemma: help them or get out. Finally, she deals with betrayal. A colleague whom she supported and helped in avoiding an administrative reprimand sullies Kassi’s reputation when she is caught breaking the law.

When a new teacher she is mentoring stands up to an administrator over a questionable evaluation, Kassi takes up the cause to rid the school of the overbearing Parks’ administration by capitalizing on her knowledge of the world of fiction. Inspired by unforgettable characters and events in lit class favorites The Odyssey, Romeo and Juliet, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, and others, she concocts a plan to help the new teachers and set up Parks.

A promising job interview serves as a distraction as she bides her time before activating her plan to derail the principal. It hinges on Parks’ desire to pad her resumé by getting a not-so-academically successful football player into a Division One university and on the incompetence of a vice-principal.

Events work in her favor until both Kassi and Parks zero in on the perpetrator of the bomb threats. Bullied, beleaguered, betrayed. Kassi must decide where her loyalties lie.

The author draws on her observations from thirty-five years in the world of public education to create Class, Coffee, & Confrontation. This novel is the first in a series of stories with Kassi Stanton as Canon Bel, a literary superhero. During her career, the author observed the education system as teacher, mentor, coach, curriculum writer, evaluator, and parent. She interacted with students, parents, teachers, administrators, and politicians who affected and were affected by the system, some selfishly but more unselfishly. The author majored in Education, earned an MA in English, and taught for thirty-five years. Beyond the obvious connection to literature in her career, she is an avid reader of all types of fiction and nonfiction. People who are proud to have never read an entire novel are the inspiration for the story. If she can create a desire in people to want to read literature, classics or popular, she will consider her writing a success.