This autobiographical account of the year Winkler spent at a rural teacher training college flashes back to the Jamaica of the narrator"s childhood, recounting incidents and vignettes that shed light on the muddle of competing personalities, doctrines and images of self, currently vying for centre stage in the tumult of Jamaican life. Emerging form the story are the hilariously drawn characters, contrasts between the Jamaican and the American outlook, and the lessons about the perils of superimposing a foreign ideology onto a native culture.