ABSTRACT
Terry Petersen is the senior technical teacher at Rockwell High. Somebody who's been given something in most cases doesn't look after it The parents don't hold the school in esteem. The current principal wants to modernise, and has approved the diversification that Terry Petersen and the other technics staff have been attempting. A curriculum dominated by that kind of knowledge inevitably marginalises Terry Petersen's work as a manual arts teacher, whatever gloss of 'free-choice-of-electives' or 'educate-the-whole-person' the system tries to put on it. The tangled and tense relationship between the working-class school and its clientele is focused in Terry's life by the fact of living in the neighbourhood. Terry Petersen is one of the three staff members who run it, and this is one of the things that give him a solid place in the school's regime.
