Reflection of Jim Cooper "Down On The Island" : Chapter Eight "Helping"

February. 23. 2014

Chapter Eight "Helping": 

     

     In “Down on the Island” by Jim Cooper you will get a glimpse of what teaching the English language in Puerto Rico has been for the past fifty years.

     In Puerto Rico, a child arrives at school for kindergarten or first grade with an ample vocabulary in Spanish. He or she can communicate with his peers and teachers. However, when teaching English to these same students there is a gap when trying to establish the same vocabulary into English.This is how the teacher first teach a language, by association with what the student already know. According to Cooper, this seems to be a quite problem for the teachers, since the pronunciation is a great difficulty.

         On the other hand, in this chapter he touches accurately a huge conflict that college professors had to faced: cheating. The idea that he presented in this chapter is that Puerto Ricans called "cheating" as helping your classmates. By definition the word "help"means to do something by offering assistances. As Cooper says: "cheating goes in all schools everywhere, of course, but I hadn't seen it done as openly and outrageously as it was in Puerto Rico." (Cooper pg.79). After stating this, Jim Cooper continues telling us that cheating is wrong and that it should not be done. 

  

          After reading this chapter on “Helping, I noticed that he describe how Puerto Ricans utilized cheating more as helping and cooperating with each others, rather than as a immoral behavior. The polemic for Professor Cooper and others professors was that they didn’t know how to work out with students cheating, who supposed they did not committed something erroneous. However, the chapter reveal in some way that Puerto Ricans are educated since they are kids to collaborate with others, so that they do not perceive it as something wrong to look at their classmate’s test. For Mr. Cooper and of all the other American professors, this helping behavior was clearly cheating.They denounce that this incident as something wrong that it needed to be mended.Unlike to Puerto Rico, USA taught to their students since they are kids is to be competitive. For this reason, professors began to work with students to make them understand their point of view, but somehow the students never understood. Nevertheless, Cooper was one of the professors who got used to the conception and started seeing it as something typical about Puerto Ricans. The purpose for him to write about his ideal learning concepts is to illustrated to the reader the good side of a Puerto Rican. 

    In conclusion, it was at first hard for Professor Jim Cooper and the rest of the American English teacher to comprehend the main source of the cheating problem, until they find out that this behavior was taught since first grade.

     In my opinion, I believe Professor Cooper has explained the difficulties of teaching English to Spanish speakers. Puerto Ricans need trained teachers, with good pronunciation to accomplish this. However, I consider he has belittled the Puerto Rican people. Teachers cannot measure everyone on the island with the students they have in their class. 

1. http://www.uni.edu/becker/

2.http://www.facultymatters.com/autumn11/collaboration-cheating/

3. http://www.123rf.com/photo_16012627_student-cheating-at-exam-looking-at-a-friend-s-writing.html