Day 3: The Class Begins

The class began on Monday. It is a 5 day class [1] followed by two days the following week where students bring in their projects and we work on them together. We were told that 30 students signed up and that they had to turn people away, but over 40 people showed up. It is the largest and most international class I have taught. Less than half of the participants from Paraguay. Other students came from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and France. Four languages were in play: Spanish, English, Portuguese and Guarani. Paraguay is the only South American nation that is officially bilingual. Nearly everyone speaks both Spanish and the indigenous language Guarani, and it seems they prefer the latter.

We are in Paraguay as part of a UNESCO arrangement between the Institute for Water Resources (our parent organization in the Corps of Engineers who recently established the first UNESCO center in the united states) and ITAPU the bi-national Hydropower regulation organization that is in charge of the largest dam in South America. The class was written up in the ITAPU newspaper – but since the writer only spoke Spanish, they only interviewed the translators. I am in a couple of the pictures, though.

I was primarily responsible for the first four days (and the last two) of the class because I am on the development team of the second software and have experience with the first software (and this will be my fourth time teaching it). So the first few days are a blur of preparation and teaching.

Our translators are excellent. They both have PhD’s in hydraulic engineering so they do very well with technical content and even picked up the software enough to help with the workshops (which was very helpful with so many students). Teaching with translation is always interesting because my teaching style is pretty dependent on clarity, velocity, humor, and building an offbeat rapport with the class…all of which are difficult through a translator. Jokes are hard. The cultural gap is difficult. But you can tell who speaks English well, because if a joke works [2], there are two waves of giggles (about 1/3 of the class responded to the English and another third to the Spanish – I’ll let you do the math on that). But the class was highly skilled and highly motivated so we built a good rapport pretty quickly. And we also had some nice meals together…but I’ll get to that in the next post.

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[1] On three modeling software packages that my office develops. We teach multiple full-week classes on each of these programs - so it is a pretty dense week.

[2] This is also a little weird because humor is fundamentally a risk (though I would argue, it is an act of care towards students – demonstrating that you are interested not only in transmitting the material but also in their experience of it). When you tell a joke, there is a moment of tension when you wonder if it worked (not unlike pressing the ‘compute’ button in a model). But in translation, the risk is magnified, because you stand there, exposed, while your attempt at humor is transmitted, and the moment of risk turns into three minutes of risk.