Yesterday I read over Hillary's briefing on her initiative on Technology and Innovation. A lot of it sounds good but, at least for the education piece, I have my doubts. My feeling is that she's pretty much aligned with the current administration education wise and the current administration has been as bad if not worse than the previous with respect to public education. While I have issues with some of the education pieces and very much like some of the others, I don't want to get into that today.

I spent the last couple of days attending Personal Democracy Forum 2016, described on their landing site as: The world’s leading conference exploring and analyzing technology's impact on politics, government, and society. That's the reason why I haven't posted my latest Emacs video. PDF is a great conference and raised a huge number of important issues. I'll probably blog about a few over the next few weeks. One topic that I've already lamented about has been the way we as a society are allowing so much information to be silo-ed in platforms like Facebook.

Yesterday, I saw the New York Premiere of Navajo Math Circles, a documentary on a Math Circle put in place to support and enrich the currently under-served community in the Navajo educational system. At their core, Math Circles are math outreach and enrichment programs. I'm most familiar with the New York Math Circle. I'm friends with many of their teachers and organizers and my son took part in their summer program for a couple of years.

I haven't been teaching this past semester. That's why I haven't been writing much about lessons. I miss working with students but that will resume in the fall and this semester has allowed me to get a jump on new projects. It's also allowed me to look at some student issues from a bit of a distance. One issue that keeps coming up is cheating. Some of it, classroom cheating.

Some good points in the Facebook comments on my last post. One notable comment was the fact that many teachers wouldn't be able to gain the traction needed to teach CS without an AP designation. This is true but also sad that we've awarded such educational authority to a private company that's accountable to no one. Schools should run courses because they're good for kids not specifically because they're AP.

Yesterday, I ranted on about the College Board. This led to a Facebook hosted discussion which got me thinking a little more: Advanced Placement exams basically exist because we don't trust our high school teachers. I usually use phrases like "society doesn't trust" but let's personalize it this time – for parents, think about whether or not you trust your kids teachers? Do you a large private, unaccountable organization more?

Edit: Just a brief note to clarify a couple of things. As indicated in the comments, this post isn't about what's appropriate for HS CS. It's more about what kids have after they finish their education - be it high school, college, code school, or other. Some of my thoughts are the results of pondering on the exacerbations of friends after interviewing people for entry level positions. The two examples are just to illustrate the point.

The difficulties I've had with the city and DOE are pretty well documented by now. Today I'm going to tell you about my latest dealings with DOE and how they prevented my team from bringing free quality CS education to city students. CSTUY's not running SHIP, its summer program this year. That's not something I'm happy about but part of me knew it might happen. What did surprise me, although it shouldn't have, was the role that the NYC DOE played in preventing it from happening.

There are all sorts of awards for teachers. The Presidential awards, NEA awards, National and State level awards, and more. There are also awards and honors given in more narrow areas like NCTM for math and our own ACM. I've haven't won any and never expected to. I've never played well with the establishment. It's ok though. For every honoree that I can point to and say "there's a master teacher," there are half a dozen who you look at just know that it was more about politics and connections than about teaching chops.

A few weeks ago, a friend asked if I knew any CS teachers that were available to work this summer. At the time, I didn't have anyone to recommend. We were still up in the air on running CSTUY's SHIP summer immersion program. We ultimately decided not to run SHIP this summer. Mostly due to the fact that in my new position, I didn't have the time to do the necessary fund-raising and outreach.