Puerto Ricans helping or cheating?

Down on the island...

 

While I read the helping chapter in Down On The Island of Jim Cooper, I agree with him in a lot of things about cooperation and competition in education, nonetheless I also understand his discomfort in the way that we Puerto Ricans confuse cheating with helping while being educated. The cultural basis of we Puerto Ricans influence a lot in the way we distinguish between these two ideas and it can be seen as narrow or broad.

The narrow way that explains why we Puerto Ricans usually cheat while schooling is that we tend to be very helpful or cooperative people with each other and this is also one of the values we are tough while we are little kids. Since we are too little to understand the limits of helping and helping others makes us feel good, we try to help our classmates and friends even during an examination because we want our friends to obtain good grades as we do. In the same way, when we are the ones who need this help we are expecting to receive this help too from our classmates.

On the other hand, the broader way to understand why we Puerto Ricans are so helpful with each other is that our island is perceived by other countries as a little, weak and incapable and that enforce Puerto Ricans to be united, to defend each other and to help each other in everything. This is why for a Puerto Ricans value cooperation so much.

I think that during the class it is sometimes necessary to receive the help from our classmates because everyone learns in a different way and we students tend to feel more confident to ask questions to our classmates before asking to the teacher; however, I agree that during the course of the exam, the teachers are evaluating how much you learned and it will be not effective if the students are using each ones help instead of being competitive. To learn to help and also to receive it is an important part of life but we Puerto Ricans should not confuse this value with the process of learning or evaluation.

This acknowledgement is what creates such a big difference in what for me is considered helping and cheating sometimes. Competition between the students sometimes is a way to induce them to be better each time and not only better than his classmates but also better himself again and again. Helping by the other hand is not always a mechanism to cheat. Instead it can be a way in which students develop different skills, such as working in groups and the division of responsibilities to complete a certain job or homework assignment. While we are in the process of learning, it is important to help each other but during the process of examination, we students should be rivals in a competition and give our best without helping this time.  In this way, we will always try to be better and learn each time more independently what knowledge will really help us in the future.

An example of what we should do!