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 facade 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...