Stuy Yearbooks from 1995 - my first CS grads through 2015 and Stuy Yearbooks are big. I got one every year - a nice keepsake and I also had a rule - when a student asked me to sign their yearbook, I told them I would but only if the signed mine. The problem? No way do I have room in my Manhattan apartment for what would be a HUGE shelve of books. I decided to consolodate. The only thing I cared about was what the students wrote so I cut out the signature pages and now the whole bundle is thinner than one yearbook. Looking over them what's cool is just how many of those kids I'm still at least tangentially in touch with today.

Okay, not really. This was given to me in the Spring of 1994 by one of my math students. He doodled every day but it never prevented him from being an active participant in class. Apparently other teachers gave him a hard time. He said he appreciated it and gave me the sketch. His family moved out of state that summer so I never saw him again but we reconnected on Facebook years alter.

I haven't used a mousepad in decades but still have this one. It's a picture of me and three of my students. They're all graduating seniors in the picture and I had just taken them out for a congratulatory and thank you lunch at one of the 6th street Indian restaurants. Dave's (one of the students) father had the mousepads made for all of us.

All four of those students have gone on to do great and interesting things.

One day one of my students came in to my office rather frustrated and this drawing was the result. An amazing student and an amazing person who has also gone on to wonderful things.

I had to commemorate this. For years, I worked to bring CS to Stuy. I had some success and some failures. One of the fights was to allow Stuy seniors to take our senior post AP CS electives instead of a tech/shop class. There were already excemptions from tech/shop classes for band, orchestra, and chorus but not for CS. There were and are some strong tech/shop classes but some were, quite frankly, joke classes. Meanwhile the advanced CS classes were regarded as high level and rigorous so this was frustrating.

This changed in February 2010 when we finally got the administration to allow the substitution.

This wasn't a Stuy student memory but rather a personal one. At some point during my Stuy career students started to invite me to Sing! and other student productions. At one point I took notice of the tickets. They were computer printed tickets and, as I suspected, printed by the company Arcus Simplex Brown. This one was from 2012 but I have one from a couple of years later as well.

As it turns out, and this is purely coincidental, I wrote the ticket printing program as my first coding gig when I was a senior in HS and through college. That was back in 1984. It was written in compiled Basic and ran on a small computer running CP/M. It drove a custom line printer onto ticket stock.

It was a great real life example of how you never know how long your code will be running in the wild.

I also found a bunch of old gradesheets from back before I started using Google Docs for records as well as a bunch of those letters from MIT and other colleges you get when a student identifies you as being influential.

I've been spending most of today trying to find places for all the stuff and I hope I'll be done soon since I have at least one more car load to go:

So that's a lot of stuff and a lot of memories. Just wanted to share.