I woke up this morning to an email from my principal "Stuy is #1." This followed a bunch of Facebook posts by friends and alums of a similar vein. It was all about a couple of reports, here, and here. It turns out Stuy is ranked #1. Woo Hoo. We're awesome. Of course, everyone whooping it up now was quick to say "all those rankings are meaningless" back when US News and World report ranked Stuy way down on their list.

The StuyCS Family mailing list was host to an interesting discussion today. One of our younger members asked if the practice of giving technical problems during an interview was going to follow him throughout his career or if it goes away for more senior applicants. An interesting discussion followed. It reminded me of a time I was talking to a few senior engineers at a large tech company. A couple of younger engineers were with us along with a new hire.

Today was a "professional development day." That means that instead of teaching, we were supposed to work on our craft. Rather than the normal nonsense - forcing CS teachers to sit through common core math lectures or how to use the latest calculator, our host principal, Randy Asher, of Brooklyn Tech let us do our thing. Basically, it was a bunch of CS teachers from two schools - Stuy and Brooklyn Tech, talking shop for most of the day.

While looking over my tweet stream, I noticed this: RSVP today for the K-12 CS Education Panel, presented by @Uber + @FlatironSchool: https://t.co/nVBbSbRn9d pic.twitter.com/NAxowSIfff — Flatiron School (@FlatironSchool) October 26, 2015 So, on November 12, one can head over to Uber and listen to three experts talk about K12 CS Education. To quote the landing page: How can we engage our students in CS, and train our teachers to teach it?

Scale, scale, scale. Scripted lessons. Online resources, Moocs. No excuses schools. All of these are modern trends in education. None of these are about good education. It's really demoralizing reading article after article devaluing true master teachers and real education. So, last night was a real pleasure. I attended a talk, given by Alan Alda on communicating science. The talk was sponsored by The Academy for Teachers. I grew up watching Hawkeye on MASH and more recently Arnold Vinick on The West Wing but Mr.

The other day codehs made an announcement about their new autograder. Fellow CS Teaching veteran Alfred Thompson had his say up on his blog where he talked about Mark Guzdial's comment on autograders leading to less creative assignments. I very much agree that autograders, due to their rigidness lend themselves to less creative projects, but thought I'd write up a few of my own thoughts on autograders. First and foremost, I HATE GRADING.

I won't be teaching my regular classes tomorrow. I'll be meeting all my kids but classes will only be 12 minutes long. So, how will my colleagues and I spend the rest of the day? Proctoring the PSAT. This has always been a sore point with me. Back in the day, many schools, Stuy included, offered the PSAT on the weekend. If you wanted to proctor, you'd come in and get paid a little extra.

Earlier this week, Mayor Bill deBlasio announced some ambitious CS Education Plans for NYC. I posted a response here. Now that a few days past, I thought I'd clear a few things up. First and foremost, I hope my concerns are unfounded and I hope the plan is a tremendous success. What's got me bummed is not that I need to see my name in lights given that in many ways I've been a CS Ed trailblazer (although who doesn't like a little ego stroking), rather that in my humble opinion NY has squandered a great opportunity and resource and as a results, kids won't get nearly all they could.

The NY Times just posted an article - the mayor announced a 10 year deadline by which time all NYC public school students will be taking CS. I should be happy. I'm not. I feel thoroughly defeated. As many of you know, I've struggled for years to try to bring CS education to more kids and to train more teachers. You also probably know that over the years, I've become pretty good at this.

This post is in response to an email thread on the NYTM mailing list. I mentioned how the NYC DOE refused to even look at our program at Stuy let alone support us and help us get to more kids. Rather than pollute an email thread, I said I'd write up the story here. I've been at the CS Ed game for a long time. Twenty five years to be exact.