When the terrible Miss Potts takes over teaching extraordinary students Kaya and Simon, they wake up from their apathy and do everything in their power to get Miss Potts out of their school. However, they would have been better off leaving well enough alone, as Potts is harbouring a great secret, putting Kaya and Simon in mortal danger.
KAYA (11) is not nearly as smart as her brothers. She’s not pretty or popular. She’s clumsy and everything she touches falls apart. Her parents remind her of this frequently. It is safe to say that Kaya has not had the best start in life. Since Kaya feels she will never be good at anything, she decides to do nothing at school or at home, and together with her best friend Simon (13), they slide into a state of apathy, a “hibernation”, something their kind teacher Francien has silently accepted.
Simon Stommel is even less smart than Kaya, not to say stupid. He is also dyslexic and severely overweight. But his parents are very kind to him, and Kaya thinks he is fantastic, often outright smart in his stupidity. In short, they are real best friends.
But then… their kind teacher leaves the school and the terrible Miss Potts replaces her. Miss Potts smells like vomit and sweat, is extremely mean, and has bizarre rules that no one can adhere to, continuously handing out harsh punishments, even to the most well-behaved students in the class. For example, ANK (11) gets detention for the first time in her life. Ank is truly the best student in the whole school and in almost everything Kaya’s polar opposite. They can’t stand each other.
But Miss Potts seems to have it in for Simon in particular, making his life at school a living hell. It gets so bad that Kaya and Simon are finally spurred to come out of their hibernation and dedicate all their efforts to driving away the terrible Miss Potts.
But how do you go about something like that? Kaya asks her clever brothers for help, but they just laugh at her. So, they start investigating on their own and discover that the school principal – Mr. Poodle – knows Miss Pots from the past. In fact, he seems to be afraid of her. But why? At the same time, Ank has had enough of Miss Potts and comes up with her own plan to get rid of her. The idea is to try so hard that Potts gets fed up and quits. The whole class thinks this is a good plan – because Ank came up with it -but Kaya and Simon don’t participate, they find it ridiculous. This turns the whole class against them, making their life at school harder still.
Then there are break-ins at multiple students’ homes in the class, always when Miss Potts has been there on a house visit. The class is in turmoil, but no one sees the connection between the break-ins and Miss Potts…
