Jim Cooper's Teaching & Helping Chapters

                On these chapters we can certainly say that problems in the education of Puerto Rico have been since way long back in the 1950’s. In the ‘teacher’ chapter we see Jim Cooper, a continental North American, who teaches English in The Colegio at Mayagüez, PR. Jim is the only young continental teacher left and discovered that teaching English in Puerto Rico is teaching a culture that does not manage the language very well since it’s a challenge for them, so he faced his own challenge in teaching these kids. In the ‘helping’ chapter we can see how big of a problem is this teaching of English in the island.

        I refer to “a big problem “ in the ‘helping’ chapter since the teaching is not resulting the way it should be and the students, knowing nothing on the exam, decide to cheat to avoid failure. Visiting high school English classes to learn how his students adopted their attitude, he found out that since first grade the teacher are encouraging the students to look in the neighbors paper if they had doubt. The continentals who visited where infuriated with this encouragement from the teachers and said that no wonder the students did not understand them. When the students had a bad grade in an assignment it always came down to “why you gave me a bad grade, don’t you like me?” and yes he did but his job was to teach English not to give away grades without them doing anything.

        The ‘teaching’ chapter talks about how Jim was a second year professor at UPR Mayagüez where he understood how horrible the English class was for the students in the island. The chapter kind of tells Jim’s quest to change the current English program so that the students would actually learn something in classes. In recent years an innovation was released and were does from a doctor called Charles Fries. A teacher called Pauline Rojas took the ideas from the doctor and made a series of textbooks that she thought would help the Puerto Rican students learn proper English. It was to be incorporated in a series of public schools but the only problem was that the program needed at least 20 years to start doing effects in the population.

        We can clearly see the problems in the education of this time and that it has passed onto our generations some in a good way and some in bad ways. The good way has been that now most of the Puerto Rican culture has English as second language, making them bilingual. The bad things that were present in the 1950’s was that at that time the students used cheating as a resource to not fail the class, unfortunately that still happens in the present and is a big problem in this society. Certainly this is still a problem that has to be resolved for the generations to come.