"Down on the Island" Teaching English

 

As you can see the title "Down on the island"  is literal referring to down of the US in the island of Puerto Rico.

“Down on the island” is a book written by Jim Cooper and published on 1994 that narrates, with few details, some of the incidents he had while teaching English in the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez. To be more specific he refers to the entries he made on his diary between the years of 1951 and 1954. It was interesting reading these two chapters because they illustrate a bit of the way an American saw and tried to interpret the Puerto Rican lifestyle at that particular historical moment. Until 1948 all courses at school were taught in English. That year the Education Commissioner Vilaroga passed a decree stating that the courses would now is taught in Spanish with the exception of English.

Cooper at the beginning of his stay here in the island, the director department assigned him to be part of the Syllabus Committee. When he saw it he could not understand why the freshman students were reading poetry and short story when the kids that were arriving to the University had none or little English preparation. With the (more or less) ten year gap between the change of the language the course were going to be taught, there was also a change in the students. This would also explain why grandparents might know better English than our parents. Because our grandparents were taught many course in English maybe they learned a little more than our parents who were only taught English at English, which would equal around 1 hour a day in exposure to the language.

This change in students complicated and compromised the syllabus to also change, but even though Cooper saw the need of a new syllabus the director, Dr. Beckwith, in the contrary did not. “Dr. Beckwith’s (director) only comment was that the only way to learn a language was to learn to love its literature. He was one of the many continentals then on the island who didn't believe Puerto Ricans were capable of learning anything anyway.”   Finally when he was able to change the syllabus to a more accurate based on the real needs for the new arriving students the difficult job was to communicate and understand Puerto Rican culture which would influence the way students learned.

“When, shortly after I arrived in Puerto Rico I met John Henry, the English supervisor in Cabo Rojo, near Mayaguez, I was vaguely aware that the Department of Education, highly centralized, was putting in a new English language program, imported from the University of Michigan.”

At the beginning of his stay in the island he cared little about the Education system in Puerto Rico, but when he focused his energy to change the English syllabus he suddenly became interest in what happen with the public education system.  While he learned about the program he understood that it was not fit for implementation in Puerto Rico. He was right. 

Through his stay in the island he was exposed to a series of situations where he was able to understand the way kids learn and the reasons or at least what he thought were reasons enough that explained why kids were not able to learn English. Apart from the change of the language the courses were going to be taught in