Down on the Island by Jim Cooper: Teaching English and Helping

As Dr. Elaine Miller says, “Down on the island is the best introduction to rural Puerto Rico- as it was and, in parts, still is-”. In the year 1951, Jim Cooper got a teaching position at a small university in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. Because of the difference in cultures and customs between his Puerto Rican students and him as an American, this would be a challenging task. Jim Cooper explains his journey and shows us how life really is -from his perspective-, being a teacher in a foreign university.

I noted that the author’s placement in the narrative is to describe his life as a young continental English teacher. As he describes himself “I was the only young continental English teacher who returned that year”. During the entire chapters he describes his life as the only continental trying to face reality, as he had to become an important part of the faculty with responsibilities which he had no idea of how to achieve them. Meanwhile, Cooper has a gazing direction that is to criticize the people in the faculty who are really not helpful bringing the English teaching to Puerto Rico. For example, when he says, “he was one of the many continentals then on the island who didn't believe Puerto Ricans were capable of learning anything anyway”. Here we can see, that though Cooper is a continental and he might be including himself, this is the way he gazes that some people in the faculty were not supportive at all.

After reading the chapter “Teaching English”, I looked at the idea of perspective in the narrative and there is, “because they knew that for years the teachers had not been speaking English to the students, but talking “about” English. Naturally”. The perspective the teacher had was to teach English to the students, but really what there were doing was simply talking about it. For this reason, the Puerto Ricans want to bring the system of the teacher not using the student’s native language to explain the language. As for othering, “But their indoctrination, by people in Michigan who were writing the textbooks the island planned to adopt”. Here, Cooper others the people that were blinded and didn’t see the difficulties of the system they were trying to build.

In the chapter “Helping”, the identity element is very present. When the author describes that “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…”. Puerto Ricans are known to be cooperative because they are taught to be that way; it is part of their identity. In the other hand, Americans are taught to be really competitive since little, and that is part of their identity. He also says “Puerto Ricans are the most hospitable people in the world”, and is really descriptive on their identity.