So, yesterday was the first day of the semester. Since I'm retiring, it's my last first day at Hunter. Felt pretty good. I think knowing that I'll get a break after the term has alleviated some of the burnout for now. What will I be focusing on in class this last time around? I'm teaching three classes. First up is my undergraduate data structures. To be honest, I'm not looking at anything special there - just business as usual.

So, since we discussed cheating and chatGPT and decided that there shouldn't be a ban, how can it or similar tools be used productively? General use The first go to seems to be as an alternative search engine. It hasn't been uncommon seeing people say they use chatGPT instead of searching StackOverflow. This makes sense. ChatGPT gives answers and the natural language interface can make it easier to form some questions or ask for results in a particular format.

I said in my last post that I wanted to write about chatGPT. The way I see it, chatGPT is affecting teachers in four areas. First, students using it to cheat, second the possibility of students using it as a constructive tool. Third, teachers using it as a resource for lesson planning or similar, and fourth, down the road, another tool to replace teachers. Before I dive into any of those, I thought I'd spend a post talking about cheating in general.

Since entering end of term grades I've finally had a few days of legit down time. It's been a long time. In the past few years, I went right from Fall finals int dealing with whatever issues arose around planning the next teacher ed cohort. Not so this year. The three classes I'm teaching are the same as last year so while I'll be doing a lot of tweaking, planning, and updating once we get started, there's not much to do now.

No, I'm not walking back anything from my last post. I still think we have to stop using professional development as the primary means for preparing CS teachers but I wanted to take a minute to make it clear that while there's plenty of lousy PD out there, there's also plenty of good stuff. For bad PD, it's frequently mandated and frequently neither useful or relevant or even if its potentially relevant, but the time it becomes useful you don't remember it.

Commenting on my post on teaching some Software Engineering concepts, there was a comment on code review and that code.org now included it in their CS-A curriculum. I found this video but no other materials. I was thinking that I certainly hoped that the video was not being used to introduce code review to students. I mean the video is fine and probably great to show to teachers so that they'll have some idea on what code review is and why it's important.

I've been in something of a teaching funk for much of the semester. Don't get me wrong, I think things are going pretty well with the classes but I don't feel like I've had my "A game." Part of it, I think is because of the relaxed mask policy. Hunter is masks optional and in their infinite wisdom, last year replaced the signs that said "Masks required" with signs that say "Masks NOT required.

A few weeks ago I wrote on how you can't workshop a lesson. Besides the slow feedback loop, teachers largely work alone. Between classes, teachers might have a small bit of time to collaborate and bounce around ideas but with a HS teacher typically having 5 classes a day + professional assignment there's not a lot of time. CS teachers typically have it worse as they might be the only CS teacher in their building.

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.

There have been a lot of bad ideas foisted onto educators over the course of my career. One of the ones that always pissed me off was the use of a rubric for teacher observation. Specifically, using the Danielson Framework. The Danielson Framework is a LONG laundry list of topics and concepts and for each a teacher could be rated ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective. It's garbage. Sure, there are some good things in the framework but using a restrictive rubric to judge a teacher is just a bad idea.