We stayed an extra day in Portland to do some site seeing. I'll write about the tourist side in my final SIGCSE2024 post. Right now, we're back in the hotel resting before dinner so I thought I'd start the next part of my SIGCSE2024 report. For Day one's first session, I attended Colleen Lewis's Microteaching session. I've wrote about this session last year and also about Colleen's recent appearance on the CSEd podcast where she discussed manipulatives.

Listened to the latest episode of the CS Ed Podcast yesterday. It featured Colleen Lewis, of CS Teaching Tips fame talking about how she uses manipulatives. Much like Colleens session last SIGCSE on microteaching this episode made me both happy and sad. Happy because it's awesome that Colleen is bringing attention to strong classroom teaching practices and she's sharing good stuff. Sad because these are things rarely talked about in teaching CS or college level teaching in general.

One of the things I enjoy about the topics class I'm teaching is that for most of the course, the students, teachers in their own rights, deliver much of the instruction. Since I have much more CS experience than most, maybe all of the students, I usually don't see a great deal of new content for me - maybe a touch here or there, but I do get to see different approaches and teaching techniques and that can be a lot of fun.

I noticed a tweet the other day talking about gamification of education. It got me thinking. Gamification isn't specifically the hot trend right now, at least not as "the one true way" to teach but every few years it surges as this great new idea to fix education. When it surges, it's always the hot new thing but it never really is. Gamification has been around at least since I was in grade school and it was never a magic bullet.

I've been seeing a few threads lately talking about the virtues of allowing students to hand in assignments late. Not just late but pretty much whenever they want. This attitude seems to be related with things like mastery or specification grading, which I believe in but it's not the same thing. The threads start with someone saying that assignments shouldn't have deadlines or some variant and the thread proceeds with a bunch of people chiming in as to why a teacher who actually enforces deadlines is an inhuman monster.

Back to calling an audible. Around seven years ago I was visiting with some former students at Google in Mountain View. One of them from way back in the late 90s, Pawel, out of the blue said there was one lesson I taught that was particularly memorable. Not memorable in the "that was fun" way like maybe my Halloween adventures but memorable in that he felt he got a lot more out of it than a normal lesson.

This post by my friend Alfred caught my eye yesterday. It's a good post - some good examples of inserting student creativity even into small intro level assignments. While I like the post and agree with the sentiment of open ended, student driven projects, I had to take issue with the lead quote Alfred used: “If you assign a project and get back 30 of the same thing, that’s not a project, that is a recipe.

I've written about how long it takes to become a master teacher and that even after 9 or 10 years most teachers are really just advanced beginners. A big reason for that is our long feedback loop. You do something and you can't do it again for a year. I was listening to a podcast on my morning run by the Hudson River and something came up about differences between quantities of items.

Last Friday concluded the summer portion of Hunter's CS Teacher Certification program. It was an intense month. All day every day from June 28th through July 30. On the one hand between burnout and covid fatigue it was a tough month and I'm dealing with some much needed recovery this week. On the other hand, working with JonAlf, Topher, new team member Genady along with around 25 amazing teachers and teacher candidates made it a highlight of the year.

Our teacher certification program is in full swing. All day every day through the end of the month. We finished off the first course about a week ago and are currently covering data structures and methods - teaching methods that is. All day every day is pretty intense and doing it on Zoom doesn't help so we try to change things up. As with many Zoom based classes, we make use of breakout rooms for small group work.