Indian Summer carried well on into the beginning of the school year, and the hills of Lincoln, New York in the center of the state were bathed with the warm rays of the sun, even though it should have been much cooler. The trees were changing color, turning the landscape into a picture-postcard setting. On the first day of the school year, just before her classes were to begin, lovely Karen Heller stood at the window of her second grade classroom and looked toward the hills. It was hardly a day to be teaching school, she thought to herself. And it's certainly not a day to keep children indoors in a stuffy classroom when she knew they would rather be outside playing. In a month, perhaps less, the ground would be covered with snow, and the air would be icy cold. Then would be the proper time to be studying. But now… Now children should be running around the small wooded area, she thought. God knows they had enough to do without being denied the pleasure of childhood.

Karen sighed as she thought of the things she wanted to do for her students. It's a shame, she thought, that they would all be boys. The school was somewhat experimental, and the Superintendents believed that if all the students were one sex, they would be more able to concentrate on their studies. It was a belief that the voluptuous twenty-three-year-old redhead did not share. At any age, people should be with members of the opposite sex. There would be no way they could avoid it in later life, and the longer inter-action was postponed, the harder it would be for children to understand about life and love. There were enough problems in the world without making things worse.

When she had been a student in college in Buffalo, New York, Karen had developed the belief that it was a teacher's duty to teach everything, and not just those things that were written in the textbooks.