Human beings are capable of communicating information as a source of
knowledge through language. This permits exchange of information for the construction,
through the concepts created by ourselves.
Teaching is the method in which information is transmitted to one human
being to another, in this case many, a classroom. In Jim Cooper’s, “Down on the Island” he describes
his personal experience in teaching in the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez
campus, during late 1940’s and 1950’s.
By that period of time, Puerto Rico was going through major political
and economical changes that affected the system of education. As a teacher he followed the syllabus that
the department of English of the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez campus had
established and he noticed that it was not effective. Cooper had a certain responsibility to change
the system in a way that the students in Puerto Rico could learn the second language,
which is English.
‘’I realized the enormity of the
dream world or wish-fulfillment world I was walking into”.(p.68)
He noticed that the students that came out of high school, especially
public school did not pose the skills to understand the English language in the
materials that were given to them. There
were no language skills and on top of that, the government was not aware of the
reality of the mechanism of learning another language successfully as they hope
they will. This chapter represents the
historical reality of Puerto Rico in the 1950’s. Cooper lived to see and collide with this
reality. He had a unique personal experience
during these extreme changes in the life in Puerto Rico, and discovered the truth
that the students had the right to learn English by other systems according to
their needs.
The discrepancy of the education system still continues today and it still
demonstrates that does not prepare the students to be fluent in a second
language, in our case English. This is a
consequence from a political decision made in the 1950’s that had caused that
most of Puerto Ricans still have the problem of not dominating the skills to
speak and write properly in English, thus not being to duly bilingual.
(E - P and R
ReplyDeleteLike you said is very sad that almost sixty years since the political decition that decided that the English was going to be our second language, the reality now is that few people know English very well.
ReplyDeleteLanguage is very important in every human process and yet we continue to struggle in learning a second language. Hopefully this will be resolved soon.
ReplyDeleteI think that this is still a big issue today. People still struggle and don't necessarily have the want to learn a second language. It is very naive to think no good can come out of it.
ReplyDeleteMost People do not want to learn english because they are afraid to commit struggle talking or writing the language. It is very sad because people need to learn english to progress as a professional.
ReplyDelete