Chilean Chronicles, Part 97: Data Journalism Class Ends

Although generally joyous, the end of school years also have a twinge of sadness. Our time together-and, with it, my chance to directly impact the students-has ended.

Life goes on.

Last Tuesday marked the addition of a new group to the list: the 20 or so students in my Data Journalism class at the University of Diego Portales.

It's been close to three decades since I first worked with three- to five-year-old students at the Bellehaven Child Development Center in East Menlo Park.

I still remember their eyelashes, their angelic expressions and the silence that greeted me after I had biked away from Stanford's leafy luxury and toward their grittier neighborhoods.

I didn't know what I was doing with them.

I didn't know why so few fathers came to get them.

But I did know that I was where I belonged.

Since then I've worked with students of all kinds of ages and backgrounds in Boston suburbs, Appalachian classrooms, and one of South Africa's first private multi-racial schools.

This group was special, though.

It was both my first crop of Chilean students and my first Spanish-language class.

We adjusted to each other as the semester unfolded.

I learned both how to explain the requirements with more clarity and to convey my insistence that they attend class and do work in order to pass. I changed the assignments from a series of smaller items and what amounted to a continent-wide fishing expedition around lotteries to three projects of increasing scope, rigor and sophistication.

For their part, the students had a series of experiences-projects, articles, guest lecturers-that allowed them to better understand the sensibility I wanted them to develop and the world of data journalism they could enter, not just the data analysis skills they needed to acquire.

But I didn't just talk to the students about data.

I told them how I had wanted to go to Chile for many years and how I had applied to the Fulbright program four times before being accepted.

I told them about how extraordinary what was happening in the country before the September 11 anniversary of the coup, how significant the presidential elections were.

I also talked to them about my tremendous fortune in being there with Dunreith, about being able to work on a project for The New Yorker with my brother Jon, who shared his work and talked with the students twice. I let them know how much it meant to me to have Dad there, who told them about the importance of being actively involved in both sides of a mentoring relationship.

Finally, I urged them to give themselves enough time to do the kind of work of which I knew they were capable and to finish strong.

On Tuesday, they did just that.

One by one they stood and delivered at the front of the room. They talked about their data sets, their maps, their graphics and the law they chose to evaluate. Using Powerpoint or Prezi or a Google Docs, students who had had no idea of what a database was at the beginning of the semester explained how they had acquired and analyzed their data.

Dunreith and Aidan arrived about two thirds of the way through the class.

My family I said.

Please give them a round of applause.

The class complied with gusto.

The last student finished about 10 minutes after our scheduled time, and I moved forward to the front of the room for the last time.

I apologized for the lateness and asked them to think back to August, when they knew little to nothing about data.

I told them again how much I had enjoyed working with them and how being there and working with them was the realization of a dream for me.

I told them that I had learned that it's possible to live from dreams and values, and that I hope they felt the same way.

I explained that they had had the opportunity to meet some of the people in the world who do the best work in this area.

And your brother, one student called out.

And your father, said another.

You're almost there, I said.

I'm proud of the progress you've made, but you're not done yet.

You can finish strong.

I believe in you, I said. I'm available to you as a resource now and in the future. And I'll be in my office tomorrow if you need help.

Then I thanked them and told them they could go.

The students applauded and started to leave.

I stood by the door.

The male students and I hugged each other on the way out.

The women and I kissed each other's cheeks.

Then it was over.

Grading and deciding with Dunreith and Aidan what to do next awaited.

As always, I had the knowledge that I could have done better.

Vulnerability in the knowledge, too, that life continues its ceaseless forward flow. The end of the class anticipated, in a small but real way, the ultimate ending we all face.

Drained.

But I also felt good, deep down good, at the knowledge that I had given my best, at what we had done together and at the transmission of a spark that I believe, at least for some, will not soon be extinguished.

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 44: Memory Week Continues

Chile's eruption of memory continues as the 40th anniversary of the Pinochet coup approaches. Ricardo Brodsky, the head of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, spoke on Monday about how a presidential election and the decade anniversary of the coup also occurred in 1993.

But whereas the observances of the coup then were more controlled by the state, now they have been taken up by a wide range of sectors within civil society.

Nightly events held at the public library in Parque Bustamante.

Special sections and editions of newspapers.

Documentary films.

An exhibit of banned, burned and recovered books.

Artistic performances and international conferences held throughout the city.

Lectures that cover nearly every conceivable aspect of the coup, from music to art to media to memory.

Gatherings at Villa Grimaldi, the former torture center that has been turned in recent years into a peace park.

The “goal of silence” in the international soccer match that is taking place between Chile and Venezuela.

The apology by judges for their failures during the Pinochet regime.

The acknowledgment for the first time by Catholic University, the institution that was home to many of the Chicago Boys who trained under Milton Friedman and applied his free-market theories during the Pinochet era, of the people from that community who were disappeared, tortured and murdered.

This of course says nothing about the official commemorations that are taking place next week.

Last night, Dunreith and I watched the first of four chapters of the documentary series, Chile: The Forbidden Images-a project that brought out for the first time incidents that have been covered for four decades.

The water hoses and the green shirted police officers striking their fellow citizens were in 1980s era-Santiago, but they could just as easily have been in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 or Soweto in South Africa during the State of Emergency in 1985.

Today, we attended lectures about Salvador Allende, memory, forgetting and the art of memorialization at a conference sponsored by the Museum of Memory and Human Rights at the University of Diego Portales.

Together, these materials, along with the other sessions we have attended, materials we have read, and conversations we had, evoke a picture of a fascist regime that sought to suppress the seething resentment and increasing levels of protest with brute force.

I had been aware of this, even as seeing the extent and the physical violence was jarring.

But what has also become clear is the degree to which the regime sought to define completely people’s mental reality.

This took place through controlling the media, and thereby the information to which people had access.

It also took the form, as Patricio Guzman depicted in his haunting film Nostalgia for the Light, of flying murdered Chileans’ bones hundreds of miles and dumping them in the ocean or the desert so that their loved one would never experience the closure of finding them.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok7f4MLL-Hk&w=560&h=315]

In so doing, the regime sought to erase any semblance of public memory. (Steve Stern, a professor of Latin American history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, spoke today about the assertion of a right to memory that has surged in Chile and other nations.)

The various forms of memory acts are unusual, and, as psychoanalyst Juan Flores suggested today in one of the panels, integral parts of moving from a story of unspeakable pain to one in which the suffering that occurred during that time was a temporary defeat of the values and practices that define a democratic nation.

The arrival at that desired destination of course is far from certain.

There are many incidents for which accountability has not been rendered.

Chile has a five-year statute of limitations on torture cases, for instance, so there has been essentially no punishment for those who victimized tens of thousands of their countrymen.

There is also the question of how Chilean youth, many of whom have been raised on a diet of video games and who are part of a wired generations and have increasingly short attention spans, will engage with a past they did not themselves experience.

And some of the more popular materials that they see are devoid of historical accuracy, according to cultural critic Nelly Richard, who provided a thorough dismantling of Pablo Larrain’s No, a movie about the 1988 campaign to defeat Pinochet in the plebicisite.

These are real concerns that are similar to those faced by South Africans, Germans, and, yes, Americans.

And what is abundantly clear is that the cultural landscape here has undergone a seismic shift, thanks to the efforts and struggles of Chileans throughout the country who have found it within themselves both to create the opportunities and structures for testimony and commemoration and, once established, to participate actively in them.

Memory Week continues tomorrow.

Humbled and grateful, Dunreith and I will be there, attending, learning and sharing what we can.

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 XXXIV: On Sylvia Broder's Courage

Our first six weeks here in Santiago have included a seemingly unending stream of glorious lunches and dinners that start late, end later and last anywhere from four to nine hours. Thanks to dear friend Marjorie Agosin, colleagues at the University of Diego Portales, chief among them the remarkable Alejandra Matus, family connections, folks from Chicago and the Fulbright program, we’ve had the extraordinary good fortune to meet a wide range of fascinating, generous, committed and intelligent people who have opened their homes and hearts to us.

Yet even our lengthy initial meetings have allowed us to forge connections of a surprising depth, I’ve also felt an almost inevitable reserve of distance from the folks we’ve met. It’s as if, to draw from the Czech writer Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, we don’t yet know if the words we are speaking mean the same thing on each side, or rather if we simply are speaking from a Dictionary of Misunderstood Words.

Now, though, we’re starting to see people for a second time, and are finding that the connections are getting deeper.

This was the case yesterday with Sylvia Broder, Marjorie Agosin’s cousin who had hosted us and two other couples for a lovely at her apartment in the Vitacura neighborhood the first Thursday after we arrived. She and the couples had previously lived in a property with five houses in Las Condes.

Sylvia and her family were in the middle, flanked on the right and left by each of the friends. The difference was more than geographic, as the friends on the left were politically left of center, while, Jorge Reizin, the husband on the couple of those who lived on the right was a self-described extreme right.

During an evening of free-flowing, jazzy conversation, among other topics, we talked about children, and, in Sylvia’s case, grandchildren and the vagaries of home repair.

We covered the upcoming presidential election that features Michelle Bachelet and Evelyn Mattei as the two of the nine candidates considered to have the best chance of winning and the complete failure of the Census to arrive at an accurate count. (Jorge advanced the theory that it was a deliberate effort by left-wing bureaucrats to enhance their power in the next government.)

Sylvia also told us about her personal history.

Her mother was a Polish concentration camp survivor, while her father was a Polish partisan who survived the war fighting in the woods like Tuvia Bielski of Defiance fame. Born in post-War Prague, she moved with her family to Chile with her sister at age 10. She did not know that she was Jewish, nor had she yet considered why, as opposed to her classmates, she had no grandparents.

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But she did not tell us about the people she hid during the earliest week of the Pinochet dictatorship that took place nearly exactly 40 years.

There were two of them.

One she knew.

The other she did not.

She hid the one she had not met before in the first week after the coup.

Sylvia had gone to work at the Australian Embassy the morning of September 11, but instantly could tell something serious was happening.

She went to a friend’s house nearby, but wasn’t able to leave for two or three full days.

When she came out, she learned that the man needed help, and took him in without hesitation.

She did so, even though her action meant that she could have been detained, tortured or killed.

Even more, Sylvia advocated to help the man get out of the country.

The Australian government had not committed itself to an agreement that would have obligated it to take action to assist the man and other victims of the dictatorship, so Sylvia worked with officials of the Canadian government to provide him sanctuary.

Which they did.

Sylvia said she did not consciously think of her family’s background, her parents’ survival and her murdered relatives whom strangers had not helped, when deciding to take the man who did not speak into her home.

But she’s sure it played a role in her decision.

Several weeks later, a friend also needed a refuge.

Sylvia let him stay for closer to a month.

Her neighbor sheltered someone, too.

The fugitives hid during the day, and they all enjoyed themselves at night.

Sylvia said there were other neighbors who supported Pinochet and knew what she was doing.

But they didn’t turn her in.

The friend later escaped to Cuba, lived in other countries and eventually returned to his homeland. Another one of Sylvia’s friends, a woman, called to take her to a family event.

After picking us all up downstairs, she took us on a knuckle-grabbing ride that evoked Woody Allen’s ride Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, and that ended for us at the bike store run by a couple who’s worked on bicycles in Santiago for 44 years.

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We survived and started our walk down Providencia Avenue and past sites like the Fulbright office and Santa Isabel supermarket that have become increasingly familiar during the past six weeks.

As we walked, we were filled with a sense of quiet wonder at Sylvia’s unreflecting courage and at our great privilege of learning about the many layers she and others are already starting to reveal as we start to shed our initial interaction of host and guest and begin to relate to each other as fellow journeyers on the road of life.