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.