Tuesday, Jan. 17, math teacher Austin Bennett gathered up 20 dollars worth of sticky notes and marched into fellow math teacher Tony Koy’s room with a few students trailing behind him. The students began littering the desks with aligned sticky notes, covering every inch of the surface.

What’s the story behind their friendly feud? 

“Mr. Bennett is a bully,” Koy said. “I don’t understand why he insists on picking on me but for some reason he does. I feel like I’ve done nothing wrong in this situation and Mr. Bennett has targeted me.”

Before the act of the sticky-noting, Bennett claims that Koy previously came in with his students armed with balled-up paper “snowballs” and threw them at him on his birthday while his students were taking a test. 

“Well, honestly, for a long time now Mr. Koy has been bullying me here at school, and I have video footage of it. And on my birthday, he had his entire classroom come in and throw a bunch of wadded-up paper balls at me – I’d say about 200, maybe 300 paper balls,” Bennett said.

However, Koy argues that he did not partake in the plan. 

“I did nothing. I actually went in to apologize to his class, and a random group of students came by and threw paper balls. I was a victim just as much as he was. I was almost hit by one of the snowballs. Luckily, I got out just in time,” Koy said. 

According to Bennett, bombarding him with snowballs isn’t the only thing Koy did.

“[Mr. Koy] walked into my classroom and knocked my entire cart over, with all the papers and calculators and everything else, all over the floor,” Bennett said. 

After Koy’s multiple attempts of “bullying” Bennett, he decided to hatch a plan to get back at him. This plan involved sticky notes. 

A lot of sticky notes.

“One day, Mr. Bennett was talking about pranking Mr. Koy, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it or not. If I didn’t, then I would let Mr. Bennett down, but if I did, then I was technically going against my Seminar teacher,” Saanvi Kirdak ‘26 said. “It was kind of a hard decision. But, I chose to go with Mr. Bennett just for the heck of it. It was actually pretty fun.” 

The students started out by placing sticky notes on every single one of the desks in Koy’s room, while Bennett covered Koy’s cabinets in perfectly arranged rows of dull yellow squares. 

“Eventually things got a little crazy and sticky notes ended up on the walls, the whiteboard, the door and even the plants. Everywhere you look, you’d see a sticky note,” Kirdak said. 

Students even went the extra mile and spelled out “Bennett” on the whiteboard in the front of the room, along with a written out “haha” at the classroom entrance. 

“I hired my class to take [the sticky notes] off for me, and I still have a bunch that are still up there,” Koy said. “And we got to recycle them. So it wasn’t a complete waste on Mr. Bennett’s part, right?”