Today was Election Day. One of the few days each year when students stay home and teachers spend all day attending what is generously known as professional development. Years ago I was in a room with a few colleagues when my friend Dave - one of the best math teachers I know said "you know, every time we have a PD day in NJ and my wife and I have to scramble to take care of the kids I get a little annoyed but then think I shouldn't get annoyed since they're spending the day doing all sorts of valuable PD.

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).

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.

I read this piece earlier today on Nancy Bailey's blog. TL;DR (although it really isn't too long so you should read it) - it's on Laurene Powell Jobs, her efforts to "reform" education and why she's misguided as are most of the well to do non-educators working hard to change and in many cases privatize public education. Laura posts a nice list of simple, common sense ways to improve education.

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.

Now that I'm back from vacation and summer's winding down I thought I'd start getting back to more classroom related posts. I still have a few summer topics I want to write about – standards and side projects in particular but I'm also looking forward to talking more about the classroom since, after all, at my core, I'm a teacher. When I saw this article in my inbox this morning I thought I'd talk about it.

This morning, I read Alfred Thompson's post on teaching cybersecurity. as Alfred says, it's something of a CS Ed buzzword this summer. Another hot topic in K12 CS Ed this summer is the inclusion of ethics in our CS courses courtesy of efforts like the #ethicalCS twitter chat every Wednesday at 8:00 Eastern time hosted by Saber Khan. Discussions about both topics include "where should we be doing this?" "What should we be doing?

Back in May, I read this post about Angela Duckworth and Grit. Grit has become an education buzzword in the past few years so I figured I should read Duckworth's book. It took this long because there was a long waiting list at the New York Public Library to get the ebook. I'm still not quite finished with the book but I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on the book and the buzz.

Yesterday Mark Guzdial blogged about a NY Times piece discussing Silicon Valleys influence on education through Code.org. Mark questioned the validity of the piece. If you don't read Mark's blog and you're in CS Ed you probably should. I tried to leave a comment on Mark's blog - not about the NY Times article but rather my thoughts on why I think it's important that we remain wary and vigilant to industry and outsiders influence and impact on CS education and on education in general.