A Substitute Teacher Day is Not a Free Day

The book contains 9 Chapters. It begins with my experiences starting out as a young child growing up in a remote town in Sierra Leone to illiterate parents as the first in our family to attend a western style school system that had been introduced by the British colonialist. I narrated the experiences from the primary school years through secondary school and up to higher education level at Rutgers University here in the U.S.A. A lot of emphasis was provided on the draconian and abusive style of teaching that was meted in the elementary school systems those times. Subsequently my narrative continued with my experiences with the students in the American elementary educational system in the State of New Jersey where I became a Substitute Teacher. My American experience emphasized on the cultural differences and shock that I encountered from the condescending mentality held by the young American children about Africa and Africans, and how that mentality impeded my smooth entry into the world of substitute teaching in America. The American experience starts with some discomforting experiences at the university in terms of the imminent financial problems that almost destabilized my opportunity to continue my education in the United States. Then the story continued with my early substitute teaching experiences and how I got exposed to the idiosyncratic mentalities of the elementary and secondary school children who turned out to be more of a challenge than I bargained for including problems that resulted from the unpredictable expectations between me and those young but tough “American” kids. I provided detailed narratives of some of the culture encounters and clashes with the young kids when I met them for the first time. I went on to talk about my slow adjustment to the ways and expectations of the children and the system, in what I considered to be the unsung trials and tribulations of substitute teaching. The last two chapter provide for a comparative analysis and expectations of the American educational structure in terms of its apparent successes and failures and suggestions as to its improvement. I emphasized on the problems posed by students, teachers, parents, administrators and public officials like politicians and Substitute Teachers in classroom interactions that contribute to the general educational problems. I refuse to accept that, while being the richest and most advanced country in the world, we have to take a secondary position to any other country in the world in the quality of our educational capabilities. I advanced the argument that there is no reason why we can have the best higher educational institutions in the world, yet we cannot have the best elementary and secondary institutions in the world which are the sources from which the higher educational institutions are fed with students. My argument tries to highlight the possibility that certain aspects of our elementary and secondary school administrations and policies are to blame for the breach that exists in the continuum from elementary schools to the colleges and universities.