Hunter College, like most colleges and universities is facing unprecedented demand for CS. It's the hot major. Being a public college, we have an obligation to provide the best education possible to as many students as we can in our locality. This means we can't just put a GPA requirement or other cap on the major and we can't do things I've heard "elite" schools do like essentially making applicants apply to the major direct from HS.

It's fall so for HS teachers who taught juniors last year it's recommendation writing season. For many of those teachers, they're already well into the season with early decision deadlines being as early as November 1. Writing recs is one thing I don't miss now that I'm working at the college level. Sure, it was always an honor to be asked but it was a lot of work. Now I'm on the other side and reading the recs.

So, I turned 55 today. Another year older. The changes? Well, I'm seeing more doctors and seeing them more frequently and to be honest, I'd love to have a day or two without some small niggling ache or pain but that's life. Like many people my age, we've got our health issues but I'm pretty active and managing mine (hey, I had a great 8 mile run this morning :-) ).

I was in the middle of writing a post on how early and often we should be teaching CS in our schools but had to jump in with a quick hit here. As any reader here knows, Hunter was the first institution with state approved CS Teacher Education Masters and Certificate programs. Siena had the first Bachelors program (Hunter doesn't have undergraduate education programs that lead to state certification).

I've dedicated my entire career - something like 32 years, to CS education and the spread of CS education. So, while I try to be a cheerleader I also think it's important to call out things that we do or say that are maybe not so great. So, I hope I don't annoy too many people (or maybe I hope I do) with this post and maybe a few more to come.

The other day, Natan scored tickets for us to see an interview with High Jackman and Sutton Foster. We'll be seeing them in "The Music Man" come this fall. It was fun but it was the taping for a radio interview so nothing earth shattering or surprising. Still, one thing stuck with me and got me thinking. Jackman told a story about how, during rehearsals, he wandered down from his dressing room to find Foster was working with Jerry Zaks, the director on "My White Knight.

Just finished entering grades closing out my 32nd year teaching. Whew! It's been a hard year for me and I'm sure even harder for the K12 teachers out there. Still this year I'm really missing what I was oh so many years ago - a regular teacher. Teaching from September through June is a beast and from my first day on the job I had to work ten times harder than I ever had to as a software engineer and was commensurately exhausted.

A big difficulty with creating CS opportunities for all our students is the lack of CS teachers. New York City addressed this problem with their CS4All program - quick form PD to get teachers into CS classrooms in a hurry. One can debate if that was the best way to go but it enabled NYC to create a whole lot of CS classes in a very short period of time.

I've been up in Providence RI since this past Wednesday for SIGCSE2022. The big Computer Science Educators conference. Also, my first in person conference since pre-covid. I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about this big in person gathering but as it's turned out, it's been pretty comfortable. So far, I've attended two terrific keynotes. One by Barbara Liskov and the other Barbara Ericson, some really interesting sessions and some less interesting ones and have had a great time discussing CS education.

Tomorrow I'll be driving up to Providence Rhode Island for SIGSE 2022, basically the largest computer science education conference out there. I guess ITSE, a conference I've never attended, is larger but that's really EdTech with some CS. The last in person conference I went to was two almost exactly two years ago - also SIGCSE. I arrived in Portland and went to a pre-conference session and on the morning of the big start, about three hours before I ran my session, I saw an email saying we were canceled.