Puerto Rican Spanish - accent marks
I taught for several years with a woman from Puerto Rico. She was quite adamant that written accent marks are optional in Spanish, and did not expect her students to use them consistently.
Now that I am no longer teaching with her, I am curious. Is this common in Puerto Rico? Or was this possibly her own teaching philosophy?
Thanks in advance to those of you who live or have lived in Puerto Rico who can shed some light on this for me...
7 Answers
It is most definitely her "teaching philosophy", and quite a wrong one at that.
I'd most certainly have heated words if any school teacher tried to sell that story to my son! 
Puerto Rico has its own chapter of the Real Academia and, academically at least, the Spanish rules there are the same ones as anywhere else. What people actually say or write on the street are a different matter altogether. 
Not to put too fine a point on it:
A year , or more, ago we had a member (a self-described translator of Spanish-English from Mexico) who, as a matter of principle/political-philosophy, refused to use capitalization and tildes. According to her report, she was demonstrating her support/solidarity with the illiterate (or only marginally literate) campesinos of Mexico. Her apparent thesis was that since people with only a year or two of formal education (or even, none) could not accurately write Spanish, nobody else should. The use of traditional spelling/punctuation was, somehow, an insult to those who had not learned it.
I have heard similar arguments advanced in favor of all sorts of "non-traditional" constructions/spellings/vocabulary in English. To my mind all of them reduce to saying, "Since many people are incapable/unwilling to use language with precision, everyone should abandon any attempt at precision and just speak "mush". Subtleties/precision/distinctions do not matter and most people can't (be bothered to) understand them, so we should direct all of our efforts at the lowest common denominator.
That's like an English teacher claiming that capitalization and punctuation are optional. Wait, maybe they are teaching that nowadays.
Hello,
I totally agree with Gekko. Accent marks can change meaning and it is very important not to get lazy. I would also be outraged if a teacher was teaching that to my child. The rules of a language can not be manipulated like that by individuals.
I don't know why I can't post any comments (dial up woes again?) but I have really enjoyed reading everyone's posts and the comments on those posts. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts. 
It's nice to know that I'm really not a complete fossil!
Mountaingirl, this apathetic use of the language may possibly be embraced by more than just this one woman in PR. Some years ago a Puerto Rican woman, also a teacher, told me that she was talking a course in university to break away from her "sloppy use" of Spanish so that she could find a better job teaching.
Samdie, I agree that such an bizarre attitude towards langauge learning makes no little or sense whatsoever !
I have helped to teach young children from the ages of 4 - 8 years as a teaching assistant in Primary schools in England and just because some children from non- English backgrounds struggled to learn the language we did not abandon the correct teaching of English....since, to have done so would have put all the children at a distinct disadvantage...in their later years as well as cause an uproar among the parents; and understandably so !
If there were no accents in Spanish or any other langauge how on earth would anyone ever know how to pronounce any words correctly? These accents are written so that people learning a language might have/be given some clear guidelines.
In addition, if we were to apply and extend that crazy philosophy to the driving standards on our roads should we just abandon the Highway code and good standards of driving just because some people seem unwilling or incapable of driving safely?
That was rhetorical I am sure most sensible people have already worked out the answer 
