“Teaching” really shows the struggle of a
professor trying to make students learn. It’s not easy learning a new language,
better yet; it’s not easy to teach a new language to students within a year. It
takes a lot of patience and much work to finally dominate the language. Cooper
shows his struggle towards the students and others professors; he shows how
unsure he is since he needs to follow the syllabus they give him to teach a new
language, in this case English. Not only that, in college students are expected
to already know at least something of the English language, but sadly the
reality in Puerto Rico is that many public schools don’t fully teach this
strategies. This is overwhelming for Cooper because he needs to follow what he
is commanded to do but at the same time he needs to teach students from
scratch. That is where the conflict enters and he does not know what to do.
Everybody is different and I believe that
everybody also has different ways to teach things. With that said, I see
Cooper’s struggle with his students and his way of teaching them. His struggle
can be seen when he says, “But I had no
materials for language teaching, no idea where they could be obtained, and
anyway the situations were in no way comparable. I was so overwhelmed by
everything that all I could think of to do was try to cope with things as they
were, no matter how frustrating”. This part of Cooper struggling made me
think in how sometimes I take for granted professors. In where I expect from
them a lot and I forget their just people too. They take their time to actually
make you learn new things and have new perspectives Cooper just wants his
students to dominate at least a second language by actually teaching it and not
just give his students what he is ordered to do (Which makes them learn
nothing). Instead he is willing to take his time for the students for them to
have better education. It’s good to see those kinds of professors where one can
truly count and give hope to the future generations to complete their college
experience with new knowledge and perspective.
I concur with you observations of the reading. Teaching students a new language in a year can be full of hardships adding the fact that at the time schools were not prepared to teach English in middle school or high school. When you went to university it must have been like taking English for the first time and it must have been very frustrating to the professor to experience this for the first time here on the island. I also agree that every professor has different ways of teaching and some of those ways work with the students and some do not. It all depends on how well those the student adapt to the teacher and vice versa.
ReplyDeleteIt is a struggle for Jim Cooper to teach English to people who had little to no knowledge of the language, and we all know how stubborn us Puerto Ricans can be sometimes. It could not have been an easy task and we see it in the reading considering how the government and the own administration of the University was basically working against him. The sad truth is that most students are not adequately prepared in their English knowledge by the time they graduate high school and that can bring about difficulties especially if the profession they are studying involves copious amounts of English.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you when you say that Cooper was willing to take his time to help the students obtain a better education. Sadly, teachers like that are far in between nowadays. Dedication is a very important quality for teachers to posses. It makes them a lot better at what they do.
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