LAST week was American Education Week, and Orange County, Florida has a Teach-In each year where people can volunteer to teach for a day. The volunteer teachers are encouraged to speak about their jobs, read a book or speak about a topic appropriate for the age group.

I was assigned to a middle school and a high school on Wednesday, and it was an eye-opening experience.

My focus was on entrepreneurship and perseverance. Using examples such as how many times Thomas Edison failed before inventing the light bulb, the reason behind the name ‘WD-40’ and how many times JK Rowling was rejected by publishers who felt a book series about a boy wizard named Harry Potter would never sell well, I encouraged the students to view failure as part of success and not let the many naysayers they encounter get them down.

As a Jamaican, I was happy to be giving these children the chance to see a different side of our culture. Mainstream media often present Jamaicans in a negative light by focusing on the guns/drug culture or the high crime rate in the island. The positive light comes from tourism ads, reggae music and, of course, our sprinters. Now we can also count Tessanne Chin among those helping to spread the positive image.

I was super proud that one person in the high school class was a Jamaican young woman from St Ann who attended Holy Childhood before migrating. The teacher was amazed that although she was the age of an average American eighth grader, she was in the 10th grade and doing quite well.

This was brought to my attention because the teacher could not understand how I graduated from the University of Miami at the age of 19, but figured it had something to do with being from Jamaica (I explained that I finished fifth form at 15 and went straight to college).

The most surprising question was what language we spoke in Jamaica. I had to dive into patois vs standard English and the difference between “uptown” and other parts of the island. It was an enjoyable day and I look forward to doing it more often, but I also took some key ideas and lessons from it.

First, no one should complain about teachers until they have walked a day in their shoes. There were some students who made me feel sorry for the teacher because of the way they carried on in the class. Thankfully, I managed to corral a few by getting them to laugh a few times. I could not imagine having to deal with such classes day in and day out.

I would love to see Jamaican schools roll out a Teach-In programme where citizens could apply to teach for a day and get first-hand experience with how schools operate in this new technology-driven environment.

This would definitely lead to more respect for teachers and an improvement in the way some parents raise their children to behave at school. The programme is not hard to create and a pilot could be run at a few schools to work out the kinks and then be expanded under the Ministry of Education over a school year.

Second, I truly believe that Jamaica could benefit from more Jamaicans overseas taking part in such things because the good Jamaicans are not nearly as visible as those committing criminal acts. I would like to use this column to specifically ask my fellow Jamaicans, especially those in the USA and Canada, to take a day in the next 12 months to volunteer as a teacher at one school in your community and help to dispel the stereotypes that exist about us.

Helping Jamaica does not always require a financial contribution as there are other things of value. Reputation is important if Jamaica is to grow its economy, and those of us who live abroad can play a significant role in improving that.

David Mullings is CEO of Keystone Augusta and was the first Future Leaders representative for the USA on the Jamaica Diaspora Advisory Board. He can be found at facebook.com/davidpmullings and twitter.com/davidmullings