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 XXXVII: On Hugo Rojas' Longing for Pisco Sour and Ceviche

After two years in England, new friend Hugo Rojas started hallucinating about ceviche and pisco sour from his beloved Chilean homeland. The professor of the sociology of law shared the details of his hallucinations several hours into a thoroughly enjoyable Saturday evening with Dunreith and his lovely wife Angelica in their living room that has a comfortable couch on one side of the room and a neatly ordered bookshelf lined with English and Spanish volumes on the other.

Hugo’s revelation came after we had met his nine-year-old daughter Victoria, an avid reader who brought out three hefty, English-language tomes she is working her way through at the moment. Two of the works are by Arthur Ransome, an author who published in the 1940s and whose books Victoria is consuming because she wants to learn about the “old England.” Victoria´s third book was The Diary of Anne Frank.

It came after we had learned about new evidence in court case being argued in the Chilean Supreme Court at the moment by a friend of his who is arguing that former Chilean Salvador Allende did not, as has been commonly understood, actually commit suicide with a machine gun given to him by Cuban leader and revolutionary comrade Fidel Castro.

Rather, he was murdered, Hugo’s friend is asserting.

It arrived after Hugo’s telling us about his childhood in Sewell, an American mining town about two hours from Santiago that was nationalized during the Allende era.

His sharing came after he had talked us through the inner workings of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, about Pinochet’s middle-class background, insecurity and craving for recognition, and his only being made aware of the coup that had been planned since November of 1972 on September 9, 1973. Hugo told us about Pinochet’s taking a full 30 minutes to sign the document that came just before the coup that signaled he was committed to the plan, yet only did so after signing the document with his own pen and personal seal.

Before Hugo told us about his tantalizing visions, the four of us had consumed most, but not all, of the elegantly garnished seafood –Angelica and Hugo brought out shrimp and salmon and, of course, the ceviche-that we had dished out into individual bowls.

We had moved through drinking a tangy, cold pisco sour to a crispy white wine and a rich red.

The raw emotion of Hugo’s statement was in stark contrast with the reserved demeanor he exhibited the first time we met in person several weeks ago for lunch with Dunreith and our mutual friends Miguel Huerta and Macarena Rodriguez, one of Hugo’s law school colleagues at the University of Alberto Hurtado.

We had initially connected in 2008, thanks to dear friend Stacey Platt. After we had exchanged emails and spoken via Skype, Hugo had written a letter of invitation for me to spend a semester at Alberto Hurtado as a Fulbright scholar.

My application was not successful, and we had maintained contact in the ensuing five years.

During our meal together he had talked to me about his dissertation on memory in Chilea-when I told him it would be a significant project, he replied, “That’s what I keep telling my wife”-his experience of having met Ariel Dorfman in the United States, and his thoughts about why Dorfman is less known and less popular in Chile than fellow émigré author Isabel Allende.

Tall and sturdy, dressed in a sweater and a tweed jacket, his short black hair neatly combed, he exuded intelligence, perspective and reserve.

His statement about his food-based hallucinations contained humor and just a trace of anguish at the memory.

Of course, Hugo is not the first of my foreign-born friends to be driven to intense longing for their native countries.

Ntuthuko Bhengu, a doctor, businessman, and entrepreneur was part of a crew of exchange partner Vukani Cele’s friend who hosted me with unstinting generosity throughout my time in Tongaat, South Africa from August 1995 to July 1996.

Like Hugo, Ntuthuko started shuddering as he recalled the bitter winter cold in England that penetrated the core of his being and nearly made him weep with desire for the fierce humidity and heat of South Africa.

I had empathy for Hugo, too.

In August 1978, shortly before I was about to join the ranks of Pierce School eighth graders I had wanted to belong since entering kindergarten eight years earlier, Dad had come home and told us that we were moving to Oxford, England for the year.

Academically, it was the hardest of my life, with 12 subjects, school until 12:55 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, and a tracking system that meant, like the English class system, that top marks were allocated for the students in the highest set, teachers who openly mocked our being American and a minister who said that the Jews had had an easy go of things throughout history.

The lowest point for me, the equivalent of Hugo’s culinary deprivation and Ntuthuko’s winter, was my first midterm report.

In it I received five gammas, the mark that meant I was in the lowest quarter of the class.

I kept my composure during school, and burst into a near inconsolable flood of tears when I got home.

I understand what England can do to outsiders.

Angelica, who had arranged for me to speak to students about Dr. King´s life and legacy at the St. George´s school where she teaches, explained after Hugo spoke that she hates to cook-an announcement that sparked an enthusiastic, sisterly high five from Dunreith.

Nevertheless, she reached within herself to try again and again, perhaps 10 times, to prepare a ceviche that would meet her husband's exacting standards.

Nothing worked.

Angelica was a key figure in a story Hugo told us about a fellow Chilean graduate student also studying in Oxford.

A group of the students would gather at each other’s homes and share food with each other.

This gentleman brought a bottle of pisco sour, but only shared a dollop with each member of the group.

When it was time to leave, he looked to take whatever remained in his bottle with him.

You have to leave it here, Hugo and the others told him.

No, Angelica told me I could take it, he answered.

She just told you that because she’s a very kind person, the group replied.

The man maintained his insistence on relying on Angelica’s kindness, and, eventually left with his bottle.

Decades may pass, but the stain on the man’s reputation will remain intact among his fellow Chileans.

This March, Hugo, Angelica and their daughters returned to Chile.

His mother greeted them when they stepped off the plane.

Angelica said Hugo’s first words to his mother were, Mama, did you bring the pisco sour?

I have it and the ceviche at home, his mother answered.

The son smiled at the memory of his mother’s anticipating, and then meeting, two of his most basic longings.

Hugo and his family have been home for about five months.

He’s made progress on his dissertation, and has resumed his teaching duties and other responsibilities without difficulty.

He’s not hallucinated once about shepherd’s pie.