One thing I've learned from teaching is that there's always something new to learn. For the kids, yes, but I'm talking about for the teacher. The other day, I taught a lesson I've taught many times. Find the mode of a data set. That's the problem that they solve but the lesson is really about run time complexity, hidden complexity and using data structures in alternate ways. I blogged about this before so you can get an earlier take there although the code isn't formatted correctly due to blog conversions.

This past weekend was Catskillsconf - my favorite event of the year. I spent the weekend up in Ulster County with a bunch of my students. some great friends old and new, and Devorah. It was a great weekend but I was mostly offline. As a result I missed a rather heated discussion in the CS Ed Facebook groups. The debate was over whether or not Strong AP CSP exam results are indicative of a good curriculum or good professional development (PD).

The big push at last year's CSTA conference was the release of the new CSTA K12 standards. It seemed that every other session was pushing them in one way or another. I've been meaning to share my thoughts about them or, more specifically, learning standards in general for a while but with announcement about federal funding for CS coming from the White House last week I thought it was time.

I just read Jeff Yearout's recent post titled The Beginner's Garden of Concepts. Not directly related but it got me thinking about programming idioms. I've been using the phrase "programming idiom" for years to describe a short useful recurring code construct. I didn't realize that it was officially "a thing" until doing a web search on the phrase years later. As our students grow from newbies on I think it's helpful for them to see recurring and related patterns and programming idioms gives us a name to apply to many beginner patterns.

Saw this tweet the other day so I though I would try to plug the Awesome CS Education list I started on GitHub: #csteachers...didn't I see a list of CS teacher blogs here recently? — Pam Whitlock (@PamWhitlock1) September 21, 2017 To answer the tweet, the closet thing I know to a list is Alfred Thompson's blog roll which is actually a post he wrote on his blog in 2012.

Last year I wrote about repl.it, an online IDE that supports multiple languages. At the time it had some rudimentary classroom support and since I started using it, repl.it has become better and better. I used it last year with my class because I had to start the year in a lab where I couldn't easily install my own software. I'll continue to use repl.it - mostly for it's ability to schedule publish and manage assignments but when possible, I like having my students work locally.

People sometimes accuse me of being an elitist CS snob that I feel that CS teachers have to have advanced CS degrees. It's not that at all. Rather, I feel that CS teachers are smart and capable. Circumstances frequently result in a teacher in front of a CS class with limited content and pedagogical content knowledge. It's not ideal but it's reality. Of course I feel that we should do everything to support and encourage these teachers but we should also insist that after a reasonable period of time, they know their stuff.

With the school year starting I was originally planning on writing about my class rules. Instead I think I'll riff on Alfred Thompson's post today titled Curriculum is Hard. I'm guessing I found curriculum design and development daunting decades ago but at this point in my career it's something I enjoy. In any event, Alfred got me to thinking - when is a curriculum your own? If you grab a curriculum complete with lesson plans, assignments; the whole kit and caboodle and you use it verbatim it's clearly not your curriculum.

At this past year's CSTA conference, a few of us huddled in a corner voiced a very common lament - "it would be great if more CS teachers blogged." It really would be. We're still a relatively small community and while there's some good conversation going on on mailing lists and on Facebook, those aren't easily discoverable or accessible and in the case of Facebook, there's a question of ownership and permanence.

I got an email from a friend the other day. Among other things, he mentioned that he would be teaching APCS-A for the first time this year. He's a little trepidatious. He knows his stuff but he hasn't really done much using Java. I was going to respond in an email but thought I might share here instead. TL;DR - for all you APCS teachers who are new or new to Java - learn your core CS, lean on your resources and support and it's OK to tell your kids "I don't know, I'll get back to you.