A vice principal makes sexual advances and a quid pro quo offer to a new teacher-again and again.A cyberbully targets students-again and again.A dangling job offer baits and hooks a veteran teacher then cuts her loose-again and again.It's the start of a new year that, from day one, is on course to shatter the stereotype of high school English teachers. Book-carrying? Reserved? Bespectacled? Buttoned-up and collared-down? Hair pulled back in a bun? Kassi Stanton alters that narrative. She is literary superhero CanonBel, the English teacher you never had.After a year of butting heads with Principal Rikki Parks and unsuccessfully scheming to save Bantamville South High School from this self-promoting administrator, Kassi retreats to her summer job supervising the teen staff at Wet Zone Water Park, and there under the sun, she reflects on the past school year. The take-away? She resolves to put her questionable behavior with Parks behind her and stop rocking the BS High boat. Though she won't pledge loyalty to the principal, she promises herself to take a seat and keep on rowing. Then Parks adds a twist to her unhealthy love affair with standardized testing. Her new educational buzzword? Gamification. What better way to improve scores than to gamify test prep? Kassi's educated guess is that the strategy will better Parks' standing with the school board, since higher scores mean a higher school ranking, which means high-fives and a contract extension for the principal. She also guesses that student needs are, once again, low on the Parks' priority list. The emphasis on high numbers is not to Kassi's liking, but she forces herself to squash her rebellious urge, and she reaffirms, before the school year starts, to be her best self.Then she steps through the doors of BS High in September. A crack forms in her promise on the first day when she hears accusations that her new vice principal is engaging in sexual harassment. But like a ten-year-old water park visitor who takes on the Tornado Tube, a ride he is too small for, and shuts it down by spreading his legs and stopping himself halfway down, Kassi shuts down her sense of outrage, though she doesn't spread her legs just yet. Then when student-to-student cyberbullying adds to the tension of the fracture, Kassi hears the cr-a-a-a-cking as her best self idea shatters.She's spent a career analyzing the flaws and foibles of fictional literary characters. Now, face-to-face with the arc of her own character, she takes a lesson or two from classic heroines, gets on track to become one, and says me, too. When the problems come knocking at her classroom door, and she needs to answer them, she turns to what she knows best: the classics and the not-so-classic. She takes a lesson or two from a Shakespearan shrew she's taught about and takes on the sleazy vp and the cyberbullying case. Will Rikki Parks play a role when CanonBel, the English teacher you never had, gets in costume? Read Extra Duty Plays by Stef Aden.