Upon graduating from C.C.N.Y., Tom has begun teaching at Curtis High School, located on Staten Island's North Shore, where he faces the formidable stone gargoyles of the school's façade and his challenging Aquarian age students. Each day, the young science teacher starts his lesson with an attention grabbing practical experiment that occasionally backfires, to the delight of his students. His lessons cover a wide range of topics - including Newton's laws of motion, Galileo's free fall, the simp le pendulum, Mendeleev's table of elements, Darwin's evolution, Mendel's heredity, house- hold chemicals, the laws of probability, British kings and American presidents, plus ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. In his spare time, Tom gets caught up in a whirlwind of drinking, bar hopping, random dating, schoolyard stickball and basketball games, and an experiment with maze-running white rats. Haunted by the loss of his high school sweetheart and the endless raging Vietnam war, the rookie teacher seeks a place in the sun amidst the social turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s.