Pilot holes: an origin story and a prequel

Kitsune, OK and McLain, M ORCID: 0000-0002-8691-3155 Pilot holes: an origin story and a prequel. The Ms Tan Tales . kyōshi, Amazon Kindle, Apple Books & PayHip. (Accepted)

Text Pilot_holes_0.pdf - Published Version Access Restricted Download (3MB)

Abstract

Johor Bahru, January 2004. Tan Su-Lin is twelve (the future Ms Tan, teacher of D&T at Shining Academy, Greencuttings, Midlands, England), at the wrong end of the country from a shop the law has just closed, admitted "on condition" to a school where everything (the lessons, the announcements, the jokes, the punishments) arrives in a language she cannot hold. On her first morning she cannot find her own name on the class lists. She used to be a person who knew the words for things.

At the end of a corridor, a storeroom is being emptied. Workbenches come in on a lorry from Muar. A subject with three names and no teacher gets a new padlock on its door; until, one Monday in March, a woman walks into assembly carrying a wooden toolbox with a rope handle.

In the room behind the frosted glass, Su-Lin can read the tools but not the labels. It turns out to be enough. What happens there takes one school year and no translation: and twenty years later, in a Midlands workshop with rain on the skylights, it is still going on.

Pilot holes is the origin story of Ms Tan: the small one you make first, so the rest can go in without splitting.

Item Type:	Book
Additional Information:	Copyright 2026 Matt McLain. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author and publisher, except for brief quotations used in reviews or scholarly work with due acknowledgement.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Liverpool Institute for Research in Education (LIFE)
Subjects:	L Education > L Education (General) L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1603 Secondary Education. High schools N Fine Arts > NC Drawing Design Illustration T Technology > T Technology (General)
Divisions:	Education
Publisher:	kyōshi
Date of acceptance:	17 August 2026
Date Deposited:	17 Aug 2026 14:43
Last Modified:	17 Aug 2026 14:43
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29156

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