1960s-1970s Fable

About the Book

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 simple pendulum, Mendeleev’s table of elements, Darwin’s evolution, Mendel’s heredity, household 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.

About the Author

The author has taught science and mathematics for forty-eight years on the high school and college levels. His philosophy of teaching is to make concepts understandable by connecting them to everyday experiences and to impart important facts that the student must learn in order to survive in the world. His education includes undergraduate and graduate degrees at CCNY, Johns Hopkins University, and New York University (Ph.D). He has written two textbooks on arithmetic, a book on Western philosophy, and the novel 1950s–1960s Fable.