When I was a kid, CS in K12 wasn't a thing. Personal Computers were just becoming available. I remember pilgrimages to the basement Polk Hobby shop to play. I don't even remember what those computers were but soon, names like Apple, TRS-80 and Commodore PET were appearing. Throughout my schooling, CS wasn't a thing until High School and even there it was a couple of random classes because somehow Stuyvesant had an IBM-1130 - a punch card driven machine and a couple of math teachers taught simple programming electives.

In my senior year, 1984, APCS came in but it wasn't wide spread and it was a single random class for a handful of students taught primarily by math teachers. When I went into teaching after college and a short stint at Goldman, not much has changed.

What I'm getting at is that some of us - teachers of, um, let's say, an age have really gotten to witness history. We've been able to live through the emergence of a new study area in K12.

That doesn't happen too often.

At some levels I always realized this but in many ways I probably just taught day to day without thinking about it.

We've witnessed something that didn't even exist to starting to answer questions like what should be taught? At what grade or grades? Separate or as an add on to other subject areas? Who will teach it? What must they know? What's the point? Will this help solve the achievement gap? And on and on.

Since America consists of fifty different education systems, if not more, we've seen lots of different approaches - certification questions, standards, or lack thereof, what counts as CS? CS vs Tech Ed, requirements or electives?

In some ways it's amazing how far things have come but also amazing how much further there is to go.

Personally, I'm in some ways amazed but also lament so many missed opportunities. In many ways CS Education in K12 has gone the way of other education. That's a shame. Just like in Math, prior to NCLB Math teachers had to know math. Now. many take "math for math teachers" and can barely pass local assessments. CS Ed in far too many places seems to be going that route. CS Certification programs that barely contain any real CS or even worse, just certifying based on vendor driven professional development.

I'm also lamenting the frequency of the checkbox approach - Oh we do that in this existing class - check, or we have this one course on the books for a few self selecting students - check.

But then, there's also some good going on out there. The teachers that applied to my cert program - even the ones that weren't accepted were all seeking out real CS knowledge and a network of CS teachers - that's inspiring and of course the fact that we're discussing CS availability and equity related issues means we've gotten things off the ground and there are people paying attention, at least to that side of things.

All this, is of course, ongoing. It's going to be years, probably decades before K12 CS is settled for better or worse. Some people will want to be very involved - I'd like to think that my involvement has been for the better, and some would rather just teach but pay attention. We're living through the evolution of a field of study and really not many generations of teachers really get to be able to do that.