One Last Post

For my Journey in Literature class, at the beginning of the semester, we were assigned to create a blog where we would be documenting what we'll call our external journey. In this class, we've emphasized about our internal and external journey, where as the internal journey was through our Journey Journal's (I wrote a post a few weeks ago about this, you can read it here), and our external journey is through this blog. It's been a very long and hard semester, but as May is just starting, and finals are coming in just two weeks, it's time to seal this blog with one last post.

At the beginning of the semester, when we were assigned to create this blog, I was very excited about it: it was the first time that I'd do something like this, and it seemed like an assignment that wouldn't be a struggle to do each week. The first few posts we had to create were a little harder to do than I thought they would be. I couldn't tell the difference between an essay type work and a blog post. As I go back to those posts, they seemed a little more formal and stiff, where as time passed by and I actually got the hang of writing, they became a little more loose and fun. I learned how to edit my posts so that they contained images, videos and links, making them all the more visually attractive, and in the end finishing with 14 posts (including this one) in my blog. In this posts I talked about different activities that we'd undergo in our class, such as conferences, readings, reflections, and many more.

For me, the post that I enjoyed writing the most was Tourist for a Day. For this post's assignment we had to visit some place in Puerto Rico and act as if we were tourists, that included our clothes, our way of speaking, how we acted, and all that. When I wrote this post I had so much fun because I got to relive all the things that I did that day. I added lots of pictures, links and even a song that I'd heard that day, making that post the most edited one I've created. In that post I noticed that sometimes we go through life thinking that we've seen it all, especially regarding the place that we live in, but seeing with "tourist eyes" made me realize that there are a lot of little things that we just ignore. It taught me to be more attentive of places and people, and how important everything truly is.

Overall, this blog has been a great experience that I will never forget. It was a great way for me to develop more as a writer, and for me to learn more about this type of writing. It was very fun and almost easy way for me to write my thoughts about a particular theme, and for me to be able to reinforce those thoughts with pictures, links, and all that. I do think other students would benefit from this type of work as I did myself. I encourage people to sometime in their lives to try something new and write a blog, because it's not about who sees it or how many people see it, but the way that you are able to express yourself through other forms. It's been a very productive semester, and my blog is proof of that. I will miss being able to do all this, so with this, I close my blog Journey Through the Unknown. 

Literary Contest Ceremony

The past Wednesday, April 22, the English Department held the 48th Annual Literary Contest Ceremony. In this ceremony, the department presented the awards of students that participated in three different categories: poetry, essay and short story. Not only that, but this activity was also dedicated to the memory of Professor Mark Wekander.

For this contest, in my Journey in Literature class, my professor assigned everyone to submit an entry in whichever category we chose. To be completely honest, at first I thought that for it to be mandatory, it took away the appeal of it, because I didn't want to feel obligated to submit something that a panel of judges is going to critic and later on choose what they believed to be the best of them all. But, when I sat down to actually do it, it was fun! Truly, I knew I wasn't going to win, but it was a good and different experience to be writing for this type of contest.

In the ceremony, a professor greeted us all and introduced our host for the activity. Unfortunately I don't remember his name, but he was a true performer! He kept the activity alive and cheerful by almost acting and animating the things that he said. First off, he gave the prizes in the category of essays, and two of the girls from my class won! Marilú Crespo won first place and Ana Perez won third place, so congrats to them on their win! Plus, because she won first place, Marilú got to read her essay titled "Do Witches Get Financial Aid?" and it was great, just by the title we know that!

Professor Mark Wekander

After that, the professor that spoke at the beginning came back to the microphone to talk about Mark Wekander and some of his poems. Out of all the poems, the one that I liked the most was titled Lista. Lista is a poem about his neighbors' cat that died. One of the recurring themes in his poems revolves around the animals in our lives, and that is shown in this poem. It was evident to me that Mark was an astounding writer, and a very missed friend.

After this, the prizes in the category of poems were given. I didn't know any of the winners, but the girl that won first place read her poem and it was truly astounding! It was about how a writer is like a god and his poems are like his children. It was very intriguing and truly deserved that first place. Afterwards, the prizes for the short stories were given, but unfortunately, the girl that won didn't bring what she wrote, so we couldn't listen to her story. It was kind of disappointing, because it would've been great to hear it.

At the end of it all, the presenter bid us goodbye, but before we left, we were surprised with a salsa dance for the closing. It was really fun and the two students that danced were really great at what they were doing! Overall, I was afraid that the ceremony would be a little dull, but it was the complete opposite! It was very interesting, informing and entertaining, plus, it reminded us of the great people that have left us in this world, but his written work will never be ceased. It was an astounding activity that I will happily be attending next year.

Caged Paradise: The Experience

The past wednesday, April 15th, my class group and I were assigned to participate in a panel that would be running in the General Studies by the English Department. In this panel, we had to present the project that we had made for class a few weeks back on people's perception of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. Our presentation was titled Caged Paradise: A Web Based Research.



In this project we viewed and analysed comments and ads that were posted on the internet by what we denominated official and unofficial websites. The official websites consisted of tourism agency pages and more formal web pages, in other hand, the unofficial websites consisted of social media, yahoo answers, smaller blogs, and web pages of that matter. My part of the presentation consisted of the comments posted in social media by people around the world, mostly on Twitter and Facebook. In this analysis I came to the conclusion that at least in this two very popular sites people had a positive view of Puerto Rico's beaches and sceneries, but they had a bad perspective of Puerto Rican's and the criminality surrounding our island. Overall in our presentation, that was the entire conclusion based on what people commented on other sites and web pages.

My experience participating in this panel was very rewarding. In total there were four groups that would be presenting, and thankfully for me we were the first group to present. I say thankfully because truly, if other people came before me and gave their presentations, I would get more and more nervous as time passed by and I'd think that I wouldn't give a good speech up on stage, but I know that's just my mind over thinking things. Because we were first, we gave our presentation and I think I did a pretty good job explaining my part of the project and once I finished I felt good, like I'd done something right. I'm a dancer, and I love the feeling I get when I'm up on stage dancing and I know that people are there to see what is being presented, and I got that same feeling when I present my work in front of others that are there to see what conclusions I've made, and to maybe learn something new. It was a truly gratifying experience that has made my semester a little more interesting. 

That's me up on stage taking a bow!

Overall, this was a great experience for me to forget my nerves and speak about something that I knew what I was talking about. Plus, I have to admit that my group that gave this presentation with me was awesome, and we all did a good job. Truly, all four groups presenting were great, but I wouldn't change my team for any other! 

Journey Journal: An Internal Journey

For our Journey in Literature class we were assigned to keep a journal for eight weeks where we would write five times a week, that's a total of 40 entries, the first things that came to our mind. This journal would be our go-to place whenever we felt like venting, writing, speaking our mind or just looking for something to do in the meantime; it would be our guide through our internal journey. In those 40 entries we will be able to see the course of our thoughts while writing the first things that pop into our head. It is an exercise where we write and don’t stop writing to think of a particular detail to write about, we just keep our hand moving and our thoughts circulating in our heads. We can truly get a glimpse of who we are and we can do it by opening up to ourselves through writing.

          Since the beginning, we were given a total of 5 rules that we had to follow as we were writing in our journal, and we always had to keep them in mind. This rules said:

1. Don't crossout
2. Don't worry about spelling, punctuation, or grammar
3. Don't think, don't get logical
4. Go for the jugular
5. Keep your hand moving

We always had to follow this rules, and at first it was a little difficult for me, because I am so used to writing and instantly checking for spelling or grammar errors and looking to correct them, but with this exercise I forced myself to not think of those. The first few entries I made where a little rough regarding the rules, but once I started to get the hang of it and I actually started to "not think", and my entries became very open and easy to do. 

On the first week my writing seemed very essay-like, like I was supposed to be writing a paper on a topic based on how my day was going or how I was feeling. When I started approaching the second week of writing, it became much more easier to write whatever popped into my head no matter how random it may seem, and as the weeks passed by, my entries became much more personal and truly resembled all of the thoughts that I had going on around my head, plus, it also helped me to actually organize all of those thoughts and be able to work with certain situations. Instead of writing for someone else to read and approve of, I wrote to please myself and to bear with everything going on in my life. Sometimes I would write very clearly and grammatically okay, but some days I would just scribble so much that the letters would mix together and the words would become a bit more difficult to read. Overall there were a lot of different types of entries, depending on my mood and the things that were going on and it became very easy for me to follow the "first thoughts" technique. 

When I started writing I would start with the thing that bothered me or impacted me the most. For example, one day in February I was really stressed out because I had my first Calculus 2 exam. I was so worried that I didn't study enough or that I studied the wrong thing that I literally started writing mathematical formulas in my journal. The funny thing is that I actually followed all the rules that were given to us at the beginning of the journal, I never stopped to actually think of any of those formulas, I just wrote them as I first thought of them and then continued with whatever I thought of next. After that I just kept on writing about other worries I had about other classes and a bit of personal stuff, but most of all I always came back to my Calculus exam and how worried I was for that. After finishing my journal I noticed that I felt a bit relieved for actually getting all of that out of my system, and I wanted to check if the formulas I wrote were correct, and they were!

In the end, I got to see that this journal was a great experience for me to connect with my inner-self a bit more. It helped me learn how to trust my thoughts and just go with whatever my mind felt like writing. It was a great way to be able to manage my thoughts and to talk about certain things that I wouldn't be comfortable talking about with other people. It showed me that there are little things that bother me in the day, and writing about them really helped me cope with some of them. I learned about myself, how proud I am of being Puerto Rican, how I'm a much more fluent writer in English than I thought I was, and how I deal with that internal journey that we all carry with us in our lives. It was a great exercise that I would recommend to everyone, because it truly helps us understand ourselves and situations regarding ourselves. I myself will continue writing in journals such as this one, it's a great way to learn about myself and to vent every once in a while when I need it. 

"A Small Place" by Jamaica Kincaid

For this posts reflection, I've been assigned to read part of the book A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid (you can read a summary here). In this book, she tells us about her childhood in Antigua, where she was born and raised before she moved to the US. Her book is divided in two parts, where the first states how she sees tourists and what she believes the tourists see and think when they visit Antigua. Her second reading centralizes in the way England imposed their ways of living in the island.

In the first section, Kincaid brings to us the idea of what a tourist is to her. In her eyes, a tourist isn't a particularly good person. She literally states:

"A tourist is an ugly human being."

Some may think that she is looking at it in a rough manner. Some may even think that she's attacking tourists and that she has a violent and bad perception of them. While she describes what a tourist is to her, she tells us that a person isn't normally an "ugly human being", it's just that when you become a tourist, you have a different point of view towards the places you're visiting, and that's what makes you that type of person. If you live your ordinary life, you are a nice person from day to day, one that lives a monotonous life looking to break out of the cycle.  Her feelings towards this idea of tourists can't be any clearer in her text, especially to me when she says:

"You make a leap from being that nice blob just sitting like a boob in your amniotic sac of the modern experience to being a person visiting heaps of death and ruin and feeling alive and inspired at the sight of it."

So it's very clear how she points to tourists as people that come to a place to look for something more because in their ordinary lives they didn't find it. It is a very strong and shocking way to stereotype tourists, because in my opinion this is just a very general way of looking at it, and I do believe that not everyone that puts themselves in that position will be thinking the way that Kincaid says the do.

She finishes off this first part by stating that every native is a potential tourist. Every native lives in that monotonous day to day life that they have and want to somehow break the cycle by visiting other places and playing the role of a tourist, but not everyone can do this so easily. Not everyone has the resources or the freedom to be able to just decide when they want to become someone else in society and see the world through different eyes, in this I completely agree with Kincaid and understand that many people in the world are suffering and feeling devastated while others take a trip of relaxation and freedom in this countries that natives can't escape.

In the second part of her book, Kincaid centralizes on how England imposed their ways in the Antiguan culture. She gives us the impression that the Antigua in which she grew up in almost completely revolved around England, and as well said by herself, it is true, and that is how she knew the world to be. She tells us how the streets were named after English maritime criminals. She tells us that there was slavery, and corruption, and a lot of people trying to just make money out of them.

There is also the factor that the doctors or health treatments they had weren't actually any good. By good I mean in the way they treated the patients, how kids where checked all over by assistance before they were actually passed to be seen by the doctor. People just thought they were very meticulous in their procedures and cares, but truly the doctors didn't really like the people from Antigua, because they thought they were dirty and that in some way with their presence they offended the doctor himself.

Also, there was the fact that this people that came and imposed themselves in the island were racist towards the natives, but they were like this in a way that no one really noticed it was racism. They treated them with a type of bad behavior and bad temper that the locals just thought they were ill-mannered. Kincaid herself says:

"We thought these people were so illmannered and we were so surprised by this, for they were far away from their home, and we believed that the farther away you were from your home the better you should behave. (...) We felt superior, for we were so much better behaved and we were full of grace, and these people were so badly behaved and they were so completely empty of grace." 

We can see how the people that came to impose their believes were doing it in a very negative way, but Antiguans didn't see it as them being racist, or rude, or angry at them, they just thought they were very particular and different compared to the locals. We can also see how people from the island visualize tourists that visit the island in a negative way. They describe them in a way that indirectly tells them that they should be ashamed of themselves for doing the things they do and thinking the things they think when visiting Antigua. As everything in the world is, it is just a matter of point of view and perspective, I may not see it the same way as Jamaica Kincaid does, but it is also a matter of identity, how she is an Antiguan that has been living under this hard circumstances and sees things one way, and how I am just a normal person that one day could become the tourist that she so much describes.

Reflection on "Helping" by Jim Cooper

In his book Down on the island, Jim Cooper points to different issues regarding the education in Puerto Rico, specifically English education. In one of his essays titled "Helping", Cooper addresses a matter that has been, and still is, present in todays learning process of the students, he addresses cheating, or what he calls helping.

Here in Puerto Rico I dare say that people are very hospitable and group oriented. I'm speaking here in general when I say that it is very normal to see a Puerto Rican helping someone else because they need it. Jim Cooper himself says "Puerto Ricans are the most hospitable people in the world." Though, many tourists that come to our island say the opposite, and I think that's because they experience only a very minimal part of what Puerto Rico is, but I'm moving away from the topic which is cheating. Now, because we are so group oriented, when it comes to classes and exams and we see that someone else needs help, we give it to them even though we've been taught not to.

In his essay, Cooper narrates how when he was a teacher at the Colegio he had a huge problem with cheating. Not only did students cheat, but when he tried to confront them and tell hem it was wrong they would say they were just helping, and shouldn't they help their classmates when they need it? Cooper says: "The basic disagreement or perhaps misunderstanding was about what was considered cheating and what was just "helping"." When he tried to explain to the students that it was wrong to "help" students in their tests they couldn't comprehend why it was so bad. I believe it was all a matter of perspective. From the point of view of the professor, the students were doing something wrong by helping others pass the class, because truly they weren't learning anything of the subject, but, if we see it from the point of view of the students, they were just helping. Since our childhood, we are taught to be cooperative, and that can also be compared to an American student. We are taught to be cooperative, they are taught to be competitive. In his book, Cooper states

"A Puerto Rican student will let his neighbor look at his test paper because he wants to help him get a good grade. An American student will hide his paper from his neighbor because he is only interested in getting a good grade himself and certainly is not out to help what he thinks of as a competitor, a rival."

I'm not going to say that I agree with cheating looking at it from a perspective that I want to become a professor, because I do believe that students should do their own work. That is the only way to actually now if they are learning something, though I will say I don't agree with exams. Exams now a days are just a memory test, to see who remembers the most out of all of the things that were taught in that class. I myself have been one of those students that if an exam is coming and I don't know the material very well I just memorize every little detail, and after the exam I forget absolutely everything I knew. It's not a good thing to say, but it is true, and I think many of us have done it too once in a while. Now, because there is no other form of knowing if a student may know something or not, exams will continue to be a tedious part of our academic learning process.

In conclusion, Cooper's concern towards students cheating in Puerto Rico is completely understandable and it is still a matter that hasn't been completely addressed today. Puerto Ricans just want to help their classmates, and Americans just want to be better than their class mates. It is a matter of how they were raised, and they way that specific person is. Puerto Ricans will continue to be as helping as possible just because it is a tendency in all of us, we've grown up with that idea and it'll be very hard to try and change who we are.

Reflection on "Teaching English" by Jim Cooper

Just yesterday I was able to read one of the essays written by Jim Cooper from his book Down on the Island. In this, he recalls all the struggles and difficulties English teachers and students had in the 1950's regarding to learning this language. Cooper takes a trip down memory lane and, with the help from his old diaries, narrates the situations that he himself lived in which he had to deal with students that didn't know any English, and with professors that didn't know how to teach English. He also makes a distinction between public and private school students and how distant they were on actually knowing any English. It was a truly upsetting situation for many and he had to find a way to try and make it better.

One of his first experiences in the island was becoming a professor in the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez, most commonly known here as Colegio. Here is where Cooper noticed how bad the situation with English actually was. First of all, he knew English, of course, but he didn't know how to teach English, so in his first year as a professor he says he just went along with the syllabus he was given and just hoped for the best with his students. Now, he didn't count with the fact that almost all of his students couldn't even understand English, and the only ones that could were a few that came from private schools in which everything was taught in this language. In his essay he sates: "I joined the other teachers in laughing at the students' terrible English, as when I assigned the poem 'Jabberwocky', and, besides, what could I do?" He found himself in a difficult position where there wasn't much he could do, and when he tried to discuss his concerns with Dr. Beckwith the only thing he would say was "the only way to learn a language is to love its literature". Now, how could one person love its literature when they can't even understand a single word in that language?

In his second year of teaching, to his surprise, in one of his English faculty meeting Dr. Beckwith announced that he would become the "chairman of a Committee to Discuss the Syllabus". With this opportunity, Cooper decided that he would take matters on his own hands and create a syllabus where the students actually learned English. He, joined by his comrade Gene and Edgardo, discarded the old syllabus and created one with new books, topics and completely focused on helping the students understand the language, and much to his surprise, Beckwith approved all of the changes they made with no second thoughts.

Once all of this was updated and ready to go, Cooper noticed that most of the students where coming from public schools where they didn't get a proper education in English, so he became interested in what was happening inside the public schools regarding to English, so he turned his attention to the Department of Education that was putting in a new English language program in public schools. Once he was working for this department, he went on a visit to a school to supervise that the teachers where implementing the program that came from the University of Michigan correctly. "The program", says Cooper, "emphasized on learning to speak the language by imitating the native speaker model", and it consists on the teacher speaking and the students repeating what the teacher said. Now, the thing that threw Cooper off was that not even the teachers could speak the language correctly, saying things like "He is taking the breakfast" or "He is taking the meal". They got the system of the program down, but they couldn't even speak English themselves, so how did they expect students to learn good English with teachers like that? And once he tried to confront the problem with the teachers they just cared that they got "the system" correctly, in their heads they were doing their jobs and that's all that mattered.

In the end, we can see how difficult was the situation with Puerto Ricans and them trying to learn English in the 1950's. We need to remember that by this time there were going threw a situation where there was a changeover with the language of instruction from English to Spanish in 1949, and just like Cooper stated: "The policy on English language teaching in Puerto Rico has always, unfortunately, been involved with Puerto Rican politics". It is all influenced by what was happening at the moment, and it truly impacted the students. With time, things got better and English has become like a second language for us in the island, and more Puerto Ricans know English. There is always a struggle with the difference between public and private school students and how some get a better education then others, when it should all be equally distributed. It's a matter that should be solved so that we can keep progressing as we have threw all this years. Cooper is a great example to follow, he truly cared about the education of the students and he wanted to give them the best chance they got. More teachers and professors should think like him and maybe that way the students and their teachers will have a better performance.