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 68: We're Going to Machu Picchu

I still remember seeing the Cape of Good Hope for the first time.

It was in the fall of 1995.

I was on a 10-day fall break during my year at teaching at the Uthongathi School just north of Durban.

Fellow teacher Kay Wise, her boyfriend and later husband Suri Chetty and Suri’s brother Theju drove us down from Durban past the Garden Route and down to Africa's southernmost point.

We had already visited a tattered version of Dutch colonist Jan van Riebeeck’s fabled hedge of bitter almonds that Allister Sparks used as the framing metaphor as the separation between the European colonists and indigenous people in his book, The Mind of South Africa.

The day was cold and windy, the weather overcast.

I saw the point of land where the Indian and Pacific Oceans converged and merged.

During my years as a Social Studies teacher I taught many times about legendary Portuguese explorers Vasco da Gama and Bartolomeu Dias reaching, and then rounding that point on their way to India in search of an all-water trade route.

Standing on the same spot where the sailors had passed through unknown lands more than five centuries before changed forever my understanding of history and the world.

Whereas previously I had thought of the discipline I taught and loved as a series of dates, names, people and places to memorize and spit back, the greater the volume, the deeper my understanding, now I realized that I indeed could be and travel to and feel a connection to those people who had come before us and played a role in shaping the world we have inherited.

I thought of that moment yesterday when Dunreith and I, after a couple of weeks of searching and wading through Internet outages and hassles, pressed, “Compar” on the TACA Airlines website.

Buy.

The tickets we purchased will take us from Santiago to Lima, and then Cuzco, in Peru.

Machu Picchu lies just a couple of hours away.

I first learned about the Inca in seventh grade.

Steve Orrell was my teacher.

Sharply dressed, with thinning brown hair, he often took a break in between classes to buy or sell 1,000 shares on the stock exchange. (A tech company was a particular favorite.)

Mr. Orrell later left teaching to open a clothing store on Boston’s Newbury Street.

In his class, though, we had a major project about ancient Incan culture and civilization.

David Sharff, my early morning running partner and fellow newspaper boy, did the best one.

He earned a 98 for his elaborate drawings of Incan villages-he later became an architect-as well as his thorough description of the various aspects of Incan culture.

I left mine until nearly the last minute.

I don’t remember the exact day of the week that the project was due, but I do remember waking up very early in the morning two days before, sitting at our kitchen table and working to produce the project’s required elements.

I didn’t yet have an understanding of empires or colonialism. For me, this was material that I had to produce about a distant land that I did not even consider whether I would ever visit or not.

But I do remember the words Machu Picchu and the images of the glorious ancient temples that were the nation’s headquarters.

Yesterday’s purchase assured that we will see them.

The past 16 months have been a time of extraordinary gifts and realization of long-held dreams for me.

In May 2012 we traveled with Dad to his hometown in Germany for the first time in 73 years-a journey I had wanted to take for decades.

In November last year, with plenty of help from Dunreith and Paul Tamburello, I finished and published On My Teacher’s Shoulders, my memoir about learning from Paul at three distinct points over the course of 30 years. I had first discussed the project with Paul in the summer of 1999, months after I ran the Boston Marathon in his honor.

And in February of this year, I gained acceptance as a Fulbright Scholar to teach Data Journalism at the University of Diego Portales and research the impact of the 2009 Transparency Law on journalism here in Chile. In 2000 I filed the initial of what turned out to be four applications to participate in the program to travel with Dunreith and Aidan to live, teach and do research in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

These experiences, and the people we’ve met through them, have helped me gain an ever-stronger conviction that it is possible both to live a life based on deep and long-held dreams and fundamental values as well as to weave a life together with my blood and chosen families.

Based on that understanding, I need both to make sure I have enough space to reflect on my dreams, to give them the time and space to take specific form, and to work with those whom I love to make them real.

That process will continue in December, when Dunreith, Aidan and I board the plane and travel to a place I first learned about 35 years ago.

Once there, we’ll see the wonder of what the Incas created.

I expect that I’ll continue to savor my great fortune at being alive, too.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XVI: First Day Teaching Jitters

The first day butterflies never really go away. I first taught nearly 30 years ago, at Bellehaven Child Development Center in East Menlo Park. Four afternoons a week during my sophomore year at college I mounted my bike and pumped away from Stanford’s red stucco buildings and palm-tree laced roads. Ideals of social justice, a desire to erase my white privilege, and a burgeoning love of working with children propelled me.

I biked across the bridge that ran over Route 101, past the adolescent boys on Terminal Avenue who lazily threw rocks at me, and arrived at the center.

Silence greeted me.

Hands outstretched or folded neatly underneath one of their cheeks, the 30 children looked like sleeping angels. Their skin tones ranged from mocha to copper to dark black. The window shades draped the room in darkness.

Willie, a bass-voiced childhood friend of Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir, and Winetta, a hefty single mother whose ferocity masked her affection for the children, were the teachers. They circulated throughout the room, rousing the children from their post-lunch naps.

The three- to five-year olds stood up like newborn foals. Clearing the crust from their eyes, they stretched their arms above their heads in a continuous fluid movement. They pulled their cots to Winetta, who stacked them in neat rows of ten, and assembled in a circle on the brown rug in the center of the room.

Willie turned on the record player and placed the needle delicately on the album. The sounds of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” filled the room. Myisha, Shawneequa and the rest of the children clapped for each other as each of them took their turn in the middle of the carpet.

Michael was their favorite. Twirling and break dancing with a vengeance, his signature move was a 360 degree knee spin. He yielded the floor only after Willie insisted.

I stood at the edge of the circle, transfixed. I did not ask questions about their family’s incomes. Nor did I wonder why only two of the children ever had fathers pick them up, or why the kids wore the same clothes day after day and at times smelled unwashed.

I just knew that I was where I belonged, in a place where my values and the people I was spending time with and the pleasure in being with the children all converged.

Yet as much as I enjoyed being among the children, I also felt nervous the first time I moved from observing to leading a group.

I felt nerves two years later, when I took over a lesson for Paul Tamburello, my fourth grade and mentor teacher, and when handled recess duty on my own.

I felt them in the fall of 1989, when I strode around the empty room of desks at Newton North High School, where I did my student teaching,

My stomach tingled with nervous anticipation in August 1992, when I arranged the chairs in my first classroom as a full-time teacher at Brown Middle School in Newton.

The same sensation filled me in August 1995, when I prepared to teach students at the Uthongathi School in Tongaat, South Africa, in the fall of 1997, before I gave my initial session for Facing History and Ourselves, and in the summer of 2001, as I got ready to teach at Longmeadow High School in Western Massachusetts.

A dozen years later, those nerves are still there.

Tomorrow, I´ll teach my first class in Data Journalism at the University of Diego Portales.

The class will be different than the others that I´ve given in that it´ll be in Spanish.

That´s a minor source of anxiety, and I know both that I can communicate well enough and that I´ll make some grammatical errors.

On the most basic level, my nerves are a combination of caring, insecurity, and belief in education´s mission, of wanting very much to make a difference in the students´ lives and wondering if I´ll be able to do just that.

In a commentary he wrote for the Brookline Tab and later read on public radio station WBUR before the beginning of his final year of teaching at Pierce School, Paul Tamburello wrote the following:

How did the years go by so swiftly, how much have I accomplished, what's my place in the pantheon of my school's history? More importantly what's my place in the personal pantheons of the hundreds of fourth graders whom I've taught, advised, disciplined, and eaten lunch with for the past 33 years.

For me, the questions are slightly different as I´ve moved in the past decade away from full time teahing and more and more into writing, and the wondering what dent we´ve had and will make on the world through our students is the same.

While it helps to know that we´ve delivered the goods before, each group is a separate adventure, with new actors and as yet unknown challenges.

At 3:30 p.m. the students will file in and take their seats.

Standing in front of them, full of hope, belief and, yes, some nerves, I´ll be there, too.