My friend Neal Zupancic, actually former student, friend, and long time teacher Neal Zupancic posted this on Facebook. It's 100% spot on. I'd add my two cents but Neal captured it better than I ever could. Take a minute to read it: In my ten years of teaching, I've dealt with a number of situations that could have potentially turned dangerous. I've taught in public schools and private; urban schools and rural.

How are we going to deal with grades? This has garnered a lot of attention since COVID-19 struck. Over on the AP side people wonder if colleges will give credit? Do the tests mean anything? What about the material they won't be testing? We also have had standardized tests canceled and a variety of grading policies. I'm going to stay away from AP this time around - you all know my feelings about the college board.

Preamble I've never accepted a guest post before but when my friend and long time colleague JonAlf Dyrland-Weaver said he had something to say I was all for it. JonAlf's one of the best teachers I know - he started at Brandeis HS and has been at Stuy forever. Really sharp guy, great teacher, and really perceptive. When he has something to say it's 100% worth listening to. To JonAlf - since I know this is one of my blog posts you'll actually read - you should set up a blog of your own.

Continuing from yesterday, what about the article and report on pay and free teacher resources. The report looked at three sources - one pay and two free. They came up with a number of results but I think they largely missed the point. Their bottom line conclusion was that 'Overall, reviewers rate most of the materials as “mediocre” or “probably not worth using”.' They also didn't seem to find that neither the for profit or free sources were universally better.

There was a bit of buzz a couple of months ago when Amazon announced an online marketplace for educational resources. It wasn't a new concept - on the pay side, Teachers Pay Teachers has been around for a while and in terms of free, there are many online resources but they're not necessarily well organized or curated. What was the buzz? Should teachers be charging their peers for class materials or should they be providing them for free.

As many of you know, the CS Education programs I designed here at Hunter were finally approved by NY State late last year. We're planning to get started this summer. I've received many questions about the program and will write up the details here sooner or later but one question I frequently get is "will it be offered online?" This is also something I've been asked more than once internal to Hunter.

On the last day of 2019, Audrey Waters wrote a great piece on The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade. I agree with most of them but felt it was worth looking at a one in particular. Specifically number 6 - "Everyone Should earn to Code." I might dive in to some others later but we'll stick with number 6 for today. I read over these right after reading two recent posts by Alina Adam's son Gregory - a sophomore at Stuyvesant High School over on Alina's blog questioning NYC's CS For All initiative.

Alfred Thompson posted today about cheating on CS class projects. It was in response to Garth Flint's post on finding interesting projects which in turn referenced earlier posts by Alfred and me. Garth laments that it's hard to find projects that are both interesting and meaty but where solutions can't easily be searched for online. Alfred notes that cheating will happen and that it's an ethics issue. This is why I try to create a culture of sharing and acknowledging credit (that is, citing sources) but I'm not naive enough to believe there isn't any cheating in my classes.

There was some buzz over this editorial about the College Board last week. The two codes every child needs - Coding and the US Constitution? Who could argue with that. I'm not going to disagree. Civics and CS are important and can't wait until college. The thing that left me chilled though was that nobody's paying attention to the fact that the College Board - a private entity with its own interests has so much influence over American education.

I was planning on either following up on how I use GitHub classroom or commenting on the recent NY Times opinion piece on the College Board but the follow up, fall out, and polarization from the Amazon NY thing has been stuck in my head so I thought I'd write a bit more about it. Like my previous post, this isn't really about Amazon but rather about the long game, equity, and diversity and how a lot of people are fooling themselves.