A couple of weeks ago I was catching up with Cai - one of my many former students now living in the Bay Area. Cai was back in NY to spend time in his company Ironclad's NY office. It was great to catch up. We went over to a local restaurant and I heard a "hey Z!!" from behind me. It was Rodda, younger member of the family. He mentioned that he was at Ramp along with a bunch of other StuyCS folk and that I came up in conversation the other day. Yet another former student Zach was there, he's one of their investors. I love the Stuy CS family.

Anyway, Rodda mentioned that he started a trend of sophomores taking Stuy's APCS class, which is the old APCS-AB - both programming (college CS1) and data structures (college CS2). I left Stuy before Rodda graduated so I don't know if it started a trend but I hope it didn't. It got me thinking back on how CS classes at Stuy evolved and what was appropriate for students and when.

TL;DR - too many people are in too much of a rush and we end up with kids taking classes before they're ready. Better to slow down - do no harm. Enrichment is frequently better than acceleration.

Long version:

Back when I started at Stuy, there were no rules for CS - pretty much anyone could take APCS whenever it fit into their schedules. Prior to my teaching, there was one section each year along with a couple of other "programming" classes now and then, some were out and out jokes and others were decent CS0 classes. Once I started, demand jumped - not because I was so great - I barely had a rep at that point but probably because I made people aware that APCS existed and also they knew that a CS guy was teaching it, not a math guy. Creating the post APCS electives also pushed demand.

Still, the class was mostly populated by seniors and juniors. In those first few years, though, there were a few sophomores. Freshmen both didn't know about the offerings prior to coming in nor did they have the flexibility in their schedules to even try to enroll.

Now, at Stuy, we taught and teach AP classes like legit college classes - that is, we worked to cover the same material at the same level of depth and we mapped one semester to one semester - very different from the current APCS-A model where it's a semester college class mapped over a full year or sometimes longer.

The seniors had no trouble. Neither did the juniors. The sophomores, however, were a mixed bag. Some did fine, in fact great. They "got it" no problem. Many of those sophomores are thriving in tech today. Some were able to do okay - they made it through the class and in fact got fours and fives on the AP exam but they didn't really "get it" - they weren't ready. They could follow the patterns and mimic responses but they were not there yet. Others, just flat out weren't ready. It reminded me of some of the math kids I taught at Stuy - they came in super accelerated - some were ready for it - those were the math team aces. Others were the high achieving student in the weak school so they were pushed to the more advanced class. They were able to pass the regents exams but they didn't really "get" the math. Invariably, these kids hit a wall.

Overall my program was doing fine but I didn't feel good about the sophomores. Some made it but deep down I knew that for the majority of them, if they waited one year more - just one year more of maturity and academic maturity, they would have gotten so much more out of the class and perhaps would have gone further. That's when I focused the APCS class on juniors - old enough to thrive but early enough so they could take our advanced electives. Of course, I let seniors in as well if they were unable to take APCS with us in the junior year but it became a much more junior dominant class.

For the sophomores, I ultimately designed our intro course which let them vet CS and get their feet wet and then take our ACPS-AB when they were ready. Sure, some were ready earlier, but what's the rush? A student could still take all our offerings before they graduated so what did acceleration give other than a greater chance of failure.

That possibility of failure - turning a kid off just because it's too early has been a guiding principle for me over the years and that's why I always go enrichment over acceleration. As I said before, what's the rush.

Too often we try to push kids too fast. Another place I saw this was with "physics first" at Stuy. The idea was that there was a feeling that not enough students were taking advanced physics classes so if you gave our "best" science students (based on standardized measures) physics in 9th grade then more would take the advanced classes. This sounded good but the truth is, most were not really ready for physics. They passed the regents but that was because they could recognize and fill in the right formulas. At the end of the day, it didn't help get more students taking more advanced physics and truth be told, these kids would probably have a better appreciation of physics if they took it later, parallel with some of the math that complements the subject.

To be honest, when I hear teachers boast about doing college level work with early high schoolers or middle school kids, I'm skeptical. Sure, there are special cases, like Rodda who are ready, can do it, and will thrive but most aren't ready. In those cases, I wonder if the teacher boasting is doing it more for the students or themselves. It also makes me chuckle when i hear things like APCS-P is a college level course and then at the same time hear it's being offered to ninth graders who are crushing it.

It would be great if we took a step back and slowed down. Teach kids what's appropriate when it's appropriate and not worry about having to say "my kids did calculus in the third grade."