Over the past couple of months I've had a number of interactions with former students. A fourth of July celebration with some of my first students, a bunch of dinners dinners and a couple of alumni events.

It got me thinking that while I was the same person and same teacher for all of them, I was also a different person and teacher.

We all evolve over time.

One particular conversation made me think. I was talking to one of my earlier but not earliest grads. Someone who graduated within my first decade my career - a number of years that based on my scale would place me as moving out form advanced beginner and into intermediate level as a teacher. Devorah and I were getting dinner with this former student, who I now consider a friend, and his partner. He was talking about the stress levels and impersonally and large schools like Stuyvesant and in fact in many large public schools. Something I agreed with. He also spoke about his college choice. He was and is a really smart guy and had strong grades but he didn't want to go to a school like CMU or MIT since he thought they would be the same type of big machine hyper competitive education complex that some people perceived Stuy to be and so opted for another top CS school that he felt would be more chill.

All of this got me thinking. At that stage of my career, I was still enamored with my students all getting in to top name schools. I was patting myself on the back when my students hyper achieved and I was designing experiences for the top of the class.

Now, I didn't know it, but I would evolve. A few year later, I would refocus on all students designing my intro course and pushing the city for CS Education for everyone. I also became more aware on the college front. Whereas I don't think I advised this student particularly well, if at all back when he was a senior but a few years later, I would probably have tried to get some small liberal arts schools with great CS onto his radar. I learned that you can do just as well at a Tufts as a CMU or similarly a Stony Brook or a Hunter college, where I'd later end up teaching. I learned it was about fit not about ranking.

Later, as I got older, I'd also evolve in terms of my perception of students needs. Back then, I don't think I did a particularly good job curating my class or my office suite for culture. Sure, we had a fun quirky tech culture going on but I'm talking about a comfort zone for students. Later in my career, I heard back from a number of former students who thanked me for making my classroom or my office suite a "safe space" for them. I didn't think I explicitly did anything special other than try to be a decent human being but I think it was also part of my evolution as a teacher. Something I didn't know to pay attention to in the early years but fortunately something changed at some point so I did better as I gained more experience.

All this is to say that on some levels I was always the same teacher but we do change for better or worse. It makes sense. When I started I was only a few years older than my students. In fact, I had a couple at Seward who were piratically my age. I could be viewed as practically a peer or an older brother. By the end, I was older than my students parents.

The funny thing is that while looking back I can clearly see how I changed as an educator, for years I had my students evaluate me anonymously and my ratings decade in and decade out were pretty consistent. At the same time, my results, however you measure them, also remained pretty much the same as did, at least to my perception, my rapport with students and former students.

All of this is neither here nor there but it's something to think about and I encourage long term educators to look at their own careers and see how they've evolved.