Teaching and Helping: Jim Cooper’s Perspective

            In his book “Down on the Island”, author Jim Cooper recounts his experiences while teaching English in Puerto Rico as a continental professor. As a native speaker of the language, he finds that the level of English comprehension in the Island is very lacking. After seeing the English syllabus at the Colegio in Mayagüez first hand, Cooper realizes the root of the problem: the teachers. He is faced with a reality in which teachers aren’t trained well enough in the language to teach it and where they believe their students will learn by reading the assigned books even though most of them don’t know how to read English. To his bewilderment, English teachers prepared their classes on the assumption that their students would understand them, not knowing or blissful of the fact that they can’t continue learning something they don’t know.

            There are many issues with the way English is taught in Puerto Rico, many of which Cooper describes in his book. He mentions that politics holds a tight grip on language teaching in this country, which is completely true. Cooper goes on to explain how the election of the first Puerto Rican Governor influenced the country’s stance on language learning; how Spanish was established as the native language and English as secondary, which worsened the status of English comprehension. Although it is true that Spanish represents our culture and thus has great value to the nation, many if not all the books used as instruments for teaching in the Universities are written in English. Thus, not emphasizing the importance of English in Puerto Rico hampers the future of the country starting at the building blocks of it’s professional future: it’s students.

            The problem in Puerto Rico was not only English teaching, but also teaching itself. Cooper talks about how students are allowed to “help” each other even during examinations. It is obvious to a continental professor that this is considered cheating in the United States, but in this country it was seen as cooperation and building of camaraderie, which was encouraged at the time. As it turns out, and as Cooper finds out, it’s not so cut and dry. He recounts how one of the native teachers was criticizing this perspective on “helping” by saying that the continentals are too focused on “how” the students learn instead of whether the student learns anything or not. He may have a point in the sense that many teachers and professors seem to only care about following protocol and not on the student actually learning, but it is not fruitful for a student to be allowed to cheat since it encourages dependency and lessens the importance of self-reliance in the real world. Those who cheat throughout their lives and are taught that it’s ok will not be able to lead successful lives much like a parasite cannot survive long outside of it’s host.