Post #3 of my English Class: 

Teaching English Chapter from the Book "Down on the island" by Jim Cooper related with "The Roots of Caribbean Identity: Language, Race and Ecology" book by Peter Roberts 

This chapter summarizes the author experience, as an educator, with the English teaching system in Puerto Rico. He told about his starting point here, as he's being a professor under someone else directions. Also, he told about his experience being the curriculum director and how the politics influence in the Puerto Rico education.

I have to say that he was totally right about how was the public education in Puerto Rico; but, sadly, it still that way. I can say because I studied 13  years in the public educational system. I grew up in a traditional home, that only speaks Spanish and no English is allowed. Even worse, my family hate the English and makes me hate it too. In the school, they have few or didn't have books, we use some printed papers with short stories. Since, I was little I remembered that the English class was exactly as he described it, while I was reading I felt transported to my school years. For example, when he says that the teachers read the book sentences and the students just repeated, it was just like that. All the students repeated what the teacher said and, like he said, the repetition pattern became subconscious. We learned almost  nothing in all those years. At the end of our twelve grade we just learned  a few vocabulary and very bad pronunciation.

When I arrived to the university I had some serious problems related with my English. First of all, I entered to the Biology major, therefore, all my books was in English. Second, the Power Points presentations were in English; and third, I was the only public school came from student there. The vast majority of the group was fluently English speakers and I wasn't, so I had to learned it. I started listen music in that language, reading some books and having a dictionary by my side, so I learned English very quick.

I want to add, that when he says about that "Popular Democratic Party didn't want to give anyone the idea that Puerto Ricans were bilingual'' it's correlated with the Peter Roberts statement about the political identity. He says that this type of identity is a "basic animal instinct of territoriality"  and this is  what I think it happened when they were putting English as a second language, that they didn't want to change their ''home", their natural language. Also, this two lectures are united by the fact of difference that the author establish between those people that are from public educational system and those from private schools. And, all of this it still like that, there are the difference between the two educational systems and the bad English teaching system.