Young moscovites Katya and Vasya go to work as teachers in a small town in the Tula region. Katya is going to teach Russian language and literature, and Vasya, who has always loved to travel, exotic countries and rare languages, wants to try himself as a geography teacher for the first time. The young teachers are unsecure and frightened, both by the students and by the old teacher guard, who hope that the new teachers will stir up the "stagnant swamp". Gradually, the progressive ideas and good intentions of the metropolitan intelligentsia, who came to instill abstract humanistic values, increasingly come into conflict with the real collective consciousness of provincial schoolchildren.