Here's what the bridge leading across the West Side Highway over to Stuy during the storm. Hence the title with the weak tech reference. The storm has kept the schools closed all week so it's as good a time as any to try to resurrect this blog. As you can see, I've moved from blogger to a Jekyll based blog hosted on Github. I'm really liking the way it works but more on that at a later date.

Sorry for the weak title and movie reference. It's teacher appreciation week -- one of our lesser celebrated weeks. I'm waiting for the annual letter we get from the chancellor. Given the level of teacher bashing over the last few years, I've recently found their emails amusing. I though I'd take the time to thank a few of my most influential teachers. To paraphrase: whatever good I've been able to do, it has been because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.

Shortly after our event at Foursquare, I was chatting with Kevin Friedman (Stuy '96). Kevin's startup is Cojourneo and since it has an educational bent, he thought I might be interested in hearing about it. I certainly was. Rather than visiting Kevin, I thought it would be fun to have him come down after school, present Cojourneo to any students that wanted to stay late and then field questions.

"... the standardized courses don't shed much light on future opportunities and they make it hard for students to identify what they're most interested in. The CS department, on the other hand, is great at demonstrating all the things that are going on in the modern comp sci world." -- Asa, one of our current CS students. Asa's comment was in response to an event we held last Tuesday. We brought 100 current students up to FourSquare along with 100 of our CS alums for a mixer.

Fred Wilson and me at #SOTC2012Last week I was given the honor of attending the State of the City address. The mayor was announcing a new school for the fall. An Academy for Software Engineering. This has been in the works for a while and has a long way to go but the announcement was a major step. The project really got its start a couple of years ago.

During my first few years teaching computer science, I frequently felt isolated. As pretty much the only CS guy I really didn't have any one to "talk shop" with. It's hard to bounce pedagogical ideas off of your colleagues when they teach subjects that are tangentially related, at best. I now consider myself extremely fortunate that I have four terrific friends and colleagues teaching CS with me. Now we have the same advantage that other teachers have enjoyed for years.