I had hopes that, if not all, at least most of the students who assured me they'd be here on the first class would show up.

Folha de São Paulo, the newspaper where I'm hosted, has 12 computers in the training room I was given access to. Unfortunately the larger room, with 14 machines, was being used by Folha's own trainees and was not available.

Much to my surprise, no less than 20 students showed up on a sunny and mildly hot day, after several days in a row of a cold, grey and grim weather.

In spite of having to squeeze in, to share computers and to have to turn on the air conditioner a bit higher than normal for this season, they remained engaged throughout the more than five hours of class.

Content wise, we saw a little bit of everything, the mainstays of journalism (lede, development of a news story, its structure), ethics and good journalistic practices, making use of multiple sources - using as example the coverage (and the bias) of the Brazilian media of a police operation in one of the city's poor boroughs.

We also dealt with what constitutes citizen journalism nowadays (and what are the myths about it) and we played a bit with the Flip Cams that we'll use throughout the course and on the field.

They seemed so enthusiastic that one of the activities originally planned as homework ended up being done in class, because they started to do it, out of the blue. It ended up being a fortunate accident.

The task was to fill a wiki collaborative spreadsheet with different information concerning the several public agencies that perform duties in areas within poor districts of São Paulo.

Since nearly everyone concluded that still in class - Others were just no so quick in finding some of the data required, such as the press agents of some specific institutions, so we'll concluded it at home - I had to come up with a new homework, which ended up being a more demanding task.

Their job would be to pitch a news story related to their borrough or the area in which they live using the public agency designated to them as a main source.

There was also a second homework, which consisted of writing an obituary based on the lyrics of a rap composed by Detentos do Rap, a group whose members are currently inmates in a local prison.

We'll meet again next Sunday. Some students who couldn't make it today, said that they'll surely be coming to the following class. If so, we'll need to use either the bigger classroom or split the computers or have some pupils alternating outdoors activities, while others perfom in-class ones.

But as long as nobody is complaining, I won't be the one doing so. As far as I know, the more the merrier.