Chilean Chronicles, Part 87: Students Progressing in Data Journalism Class, Channeling Paul Tamburello

I love to teach.

It's a passion that stretches across three decades and the past millennium back to high school, when I thought it would be fun to be a teacher someday and spoke to teachers about what and why they did.

In 1985 I worked with three- to five-year-olds four days a week at the Bellehaven Child Development Center in East Menlo Park.

I only was there for a quarter, but it was long enough for me to feel that I was where I belonged.

The following year, after my parents were in a near-fatal car accident, I returned home to be with my family.

Pierce School Principal Al Fortune invited me into his office, expressed his concern in a surprisingly quiet tone and offered me a job as a recess aide.

Touched by his gesture, I accepted on the spot.

I only learned later that the reason the job was open was because the previous recess aide had fled her post after having been pushed into the snow and pelted with snowballs by members of the eighth grade class who were labeled by adults throughout the building as "the worst class in 30 years."

The eighth graders were as advertised, eyes glittering with malice and the knowledge that they had toppled the last authority figure.

Nevertheless, I loved working with them and the rest of the grades.

After graduating from Stanford, I returned to Pierce for my most formative teaching apprenticeship: a two-year stint in Paul Tamburello's fourth grade classroom-the same class where I had been a student a dozen years earlier.

To this day I still draw on the lessons I learned in Paul's laboratory of teaching excellence.

He taught me how to help students chart their progress, how to cultivate a healthy sense of dramatic occasion and humor even as you're pushing the students beyond the limits of what they think is possible.

He showed me how and when to be firm, and how you can at times win by losing.

The more power you give out, the more power you get back, he would say.

Paul continually displayed an organic sense of learning, creating whole units from a student's comment that reinforced essential skills while showing his charges that they could follow their curiosity wherever it lead.

Above all, Paul demonstrated over and over again the importance of witness, tenacity and perspective.

I've applied those lessons in the quarter century since I finished what he called my "post-graduate degree in fourth grade."

Most recently, that has taken place in my Data Journalism classroom here at the University of Diego Portales in Santiago.

It took a while to sort out exactly who on the roster actually will attend the class on a regular basis, and we've gotten there.

It also has taken me a couple of months to fully understand the implication of the Chilean university system for students' attendance and delivery of the assignments I've given them.

As opposed to the United States, where students take anywhere from three to five classes, here students take as many as eight or nine classes.

This has all kinds of academic consequences for them, not the least of which is that they calculate exactly how many classes they need to make to reach the 60 percent departmental requirement to pass the course.

I've adjusted to this environment by assigning three cumulative projects throughout the semester, by working to make the class as stimulating as possible, to alternate between exhorting the students to attend and noting their absence, and, at base, to accept whoever comes that day as the lineup we have to work with for that session.

As Paul did throughout his teaching career, I've worked to link what we do in the class to the larger world. I do this so that students understand why they are learning what we are doing and so that they have tangible examples of where they can go.

Like Paul, I bring in guest speakers to expose students to the community of people throughout the world who share our love of data.

Today, the invitado, or guest, was Joe Germuska, a former history major from Northwestern who played a key role in the development of the Chicago Tribune's NewsApps team, and who has been, since December, working at Northwestern University's Knight Lab. This interdisciplinary space seeks to help advance news media innovation through exploration and experimentation.

He also helped me get here by introducing me at the June 2012 IRE conference to Miguel Paz, the founder of Poderopedia, a site that traces relationships between Chilean elites.

Miguel connected me to Carlos Aldunate, who wrote me the letter of invitation that was a requirement for becoming a Fulbright scholar.

Joe told the students about his background, talked them through a number of projects he had helped develop like the Chicago Tribune's crime site and CensusReporter.org, a tool he worked on that tries to make Census data more accessible to reporters.

He talked about the importance of placing data into context and of making information as accessible as possible.

He stressed the integrated approach to planning and development, saying they are related, not separate, stages.

At base, Joe emphasized the need to be skeptical, critical consumers of information and technology, and the role that programming skills can play in assisting.

The students applauded Joe's comments with genuine enthusiasm.

From there we went over yesterday's visit to La Nacion, the newspaper in Argentina I visited yesterday. I passed out stickers that Gaby Bouret and other members of the data team had given me.

We went over their midterm projects.

I told them in general what they had done well in comparison with the first one they had completed about a month earlier. I also went over the elements I liked from each student's project.

With some it was their graphic.

With others it was the map they had created.

Still others wrote a fine summary, opening paragraph or conclusion.

Projects' structure, writing skill and the fact of passing the work in at all each generated praise.

The students clearly understood better how to do data-oriented journalism, even if the depth of their work was not what it could be.

I told them other areas where they needed to improve and shared what I would do to raise the quality of my work with them.

One thing I had not done as well as I could have was to give the students sufficient time to work on the practical tools I had shown them.

So, after explaining how I was going to give them more time, I did just that.

The students spent the end of class starting with the assignment.

These are all strategies I absorbed during my apprenticeship.

It's always a positive sign when students voluntarily stay beyond the scheduled time the class ends.

That happened today with close to a dozen of them.

As they walked by me on the way out, they did a combination of shaking hands, exchanging high fives, or, in the Chilean custom, kissing me on the cheek.

Their eyes danced with pleasure.

So did mine, both because of the progress they are making and because of the space we have created amongst us.

In this space failure is a virtue and all are accepted.

In this space we learn from each other and the best idea wins.

In this space we work to support each other.

I am deeply grateful to all those, including Joe, who have helped me be here and have this opportunity.

I'm profoundly appreciative of my students for how they've engaged this new and often challenging class.

And I feel doubly blessed to have learned how to teach in Paul's class more than a quarter cenutry ago and to still be challenging what he shared with me all these many years later.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXXX: September 11 Countdown Begins

Although in theory all days are equal, in truth some matter more than others.

Some dates, like Christmas and Thanksgiving, evoke images of joy and tradition and connection. (Many non-Christians have a different take of the former, while many Native American have a dim view of the latter.)

But others days are noteworthy for the memories they stir of pain, suffering and destruction.

In our country, December 7, a day that then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called “a date which will live in infamy,” is one of those occasions.

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So, too, is September 11, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Here in Chile, September 11 is also a day of major national significance.

For it was on that date in 1973 that the Chilean military, headed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, ousted democratically-elected Socialist President Salvador Allende and ushered in his 17-year reign.

University of Diego Portales Department Chair Carlos Aldunate made the point during a dinner one of our first weekends in Santiago that Chile has seen similar tensions before in its history.

But the memory that resonates loudest in Chile are the echoes from that fateful day.

The anniversary is a moment of significance every year, and this one promises to be particularly important.

The first and most basic reason for this is that a week from Wednesday will mark 40 years since the Pinochet coup.

There’s something about the passage of a full decade, or decades, that prompts intense revisitation and analysis of key events. (I’m not in the United States at the moment, and can only imagine the frenzy that will build in November around the 50th anniversary of the assassination of 35th President John F. Kennedy.)

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The second reason is that November marks the presidential election.

And a third has to do with the personal histories of Michelle Bachelet and Evelyn Matthei, the two major presidential candidates, have direct ties to the aftermath of the coup.

These two highly accomplished women have similar military pasts, but very different political visions for the nation.

In 2006, Bachelet became the nation's first female president. A divorced mother of three children, she served as Defense Minister at the same time as Donald Rumsfeld held that position in the United States.

She is also the daughter of a former Chilean Air Force General.

So, too, is Matthei.

In many ways, the two women share important similarities besides their fathers’ military backgrounds.

The families were close, and the two women were friends as children.

Both grew up in privileged homes, attended elite schools, learned to speak multiple foreign languages and took advanced training in a discipline that requires many years to master. (Bachelet is a certified pediatrician, while Matthei is a classically trained pianist.)

It was during the Pinochet era, though, ushered in by the 1973 coup, that the similarities ended.

Whereas Matthei's father was part of the junta, Bachelet's father remained loyal to the constitution and to Allende. Because of that, he was tortured daily at the facility headed by the elder Matthei, even though he personally was not there at the time Bachelet’s torture occurred.

Bachelet and her mother both were tortured as well in the infamous Villa Grimaldi compound where legions of others also were tortured, murdered and disappeared.

Even though she did not break, Bachelet has said that she still grapples with the emotional scars from that experience.

Bachelet has at different points shown compassion for the torturers, saying they carry bags of guilt with them. When she was elected president, in a gesture of reconciliation, she hugged the elder Matthei and called him “Uncle Fernando.”

Yet, in some ways, the most basic reason that the coup’s anniversary is such a cultural lightning rod is the basic fact that Chile remains a profoundly divided nation, and memory is at the heart of the divide.

I’ll write more about this aspect in the upcoming days.

Tonight, I wanted to signal the deluge of news coverage, television shows, books, conferences, and museum exhibits that have already been published, or will be so during the upcoming week and a half.

Sifting through this flood of material will be my focus during the next 10 days.

This includes a week from Wednesday, when the date that bonds American and Chileans alike in suffering again occurs for the twelfth and fortieth times since the mornings when history in each country was permanently and irrevocably changed.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXXII: Day Two of Learning from Fulbright Classmates

Today was the second day at the University of Chile with my Fulbright colleagues, and, again, there was an extraordinarily rich array of intellectual content to absorb. Yesterday’s presentations centered around the theme of sustainability and environmentally-oriented projects, while today’s sessions covered a series of topics.

Key points from each stood out from each one.

The emotion in his voice pushing through his voice as he gamely delivered his lecture in Spanish, David Bergin spoke about Mr. Webb, his former high school science teacher whose passion for his subject left a firm and life-changing imprint on him and many other students during his decades-long career.

Steve Sadlier used the image of a protest about domestic violence in which a black poster saying that not another woman should be killed was surrounded by papers with victims’ names interspersed with shoes to talk through the socio-cultural issues of society, culture and language.

In her talk about the Mapuche in Argentina and Chile, literary scholar Camila Lopez talked about “entre,” the space of being between two worlds that characters travel through in the work of Argentine novelist Maria Rosa Lojo.

Greg Gogolin gave an eye-opening talk about Cybercrime in which he shared that the chief of the Detroit Police Department told him that they don’t even go after crimes that are less than $100,000 in a month.

This means that cybercriminals can do as much as $1 million per year without even being pursued by the police in the city.

Beyond that, Greg gave us perhaps the most useful piece of advice at all; change your passwords, especially for banking, to nine characters.

Make sure to include at least one number, one capital letter and one unusual character.

Bumping up the total from seven characters to eight can increase the amount of time people who want to crack a password up from minutes to days, he said.

Adding one more character to nine can make the time to break the code from days to years.

In the final presentation, Paul Quick spoke about the expansive kind of interdisciplinary sharing that can happen when colleagues get together, eat and soak in the pleasure of each other's company.

The mood was certainly upbeat and the conversation rich as we broke bread, well, salad, fish and potatoes and a very stiff pisco sour, at the building where Admiral Merino, General Pinochet and their cronies set up shop after they deposed the democratically-elected government in September 1973.

Alternately joking and serious, we switched back and forth from Spanish to English as we discussed the relative merits of Chicago and Santiago’s transit systems. (Santiago’s Metro won in a romp over the El, except at Rush , even as Felix from the Fulbright Commission put in a plug for the virtue of the Loop as a neighborhood.)

We talked about the best time of year to head over the cordillera and go to Argentina’s Mendoza region for what Victoria Viteri of the Fulbright Commission said is the world’s best meat and food.

Many Chileans go to Mendoza during the week of September 18, the date on which the nation celebrates its independence. But the consensus among the Chileans at our end of the long wooden table was that Journalism Department Chair Carlos Aldunate was right in telling us, during our four-hour long dinner, in a tone that barely got to the half joking level, that Dunreith and my going there during that time would be an insult.

Dunreith showed family pictures that elicited oohs and aahs, and University of Diego Portales institutional memory Josefa Romero invited us to visit her family’s home in the fields a couple of hours away when Aidan comes to visit in late November.

The hour at which I needed to leave to make it on time to my class at 3:30 came just as the dessert and coffee arrived.

We have to have postre, Dunreith and Josefa said together in a tone that indicated they would brook no disagreement.

We did, gulping down the white and dark chocolate concoctions a bit faster than usual, but still long enough to savor the sweet, creamy mixture.

The time to talk the Metro had passed, so the three of us took a taxi after we made the rounds of both tables and said goodbye to our new friends.

Six weeks ago today, Dunreith and I boarded a plane that took us to Dallas and, from there, to Santiago, the capital of a country we had wanted to visit for more than a decade.

Yesterday, I met the entire group of this year’s Fulbrighters in person for the first time.

Filled with the food, drink and knowledge I had absorbed, feeling surprisingly at home, I walked up to the third floor, retrieved the blue University of Diego Portales binder from the departmental office and headed down to my classroom.

The students would be arriving in less than 15 minutes.