Teaching in rural Jamaica: Experiences of a Cuban teacher

When I came to “Far Mountain” School in Jamaica (500 students), I was shocked to find that some of the young people in my classes were either functionally illiterate or completely illiterate. At the beginning this was a dissonance for me, as I had been teaching university students for more than 25 years. At the Jamaican school, I taught Spanish to classes from grade 5 (age ten) to grade 9 (age 15). After leaving, I gave a paper at the Literacy Conference in Cuba, on teaching Spanish to students in grade 9. The paper was entitled “An Experience in the Teaching of Spanish to Functionally Illiterate Young People at a School in Rural Jamaica.”1 My aim in teaching Spanish was to contribute to the healthy and rounded personality of young people and adults. But when I saw that some of the teenage students were not literate in their own language, I had to rethink my aims and strategies with these classes. I first found out that they were non-literate when I saw the principal teaching them to read and write. I offered to help her