Another set of tweets god me thinking: How do we help school administrators help and evaluate CS teachers? asks @lsudol of @CSForAll #csta2017 Many don't understand CS — Alfred Thompson (@alfredtwo) July 10, 2017 If the current system is any indication, checklists are not the answer — Mike Zamansky (@zamansky) July 15, 2017 I get the intent. CS teachers should be evaluated by people who have some clue about the subject.

Is it easier to take CS people and teach them to teach or is it easier to take teachers and teach them CS? The question gets batted around from time to time. This time via twitter: Some think it's easier to teach a teacher to teach CS than to teach a CS pro to teach. @alfredtwo is not one of them https://t.co/QCUP8d8llZ — Diane Levitt (@diane_levitt) July 3, 2017 Agreed.

Over on Facebook, a fellow CS educator 1 made a comment on something he wanted to try with his students this summer: having the students pre-disclose bugs when they submit their projects. The post was asking for any links to "the literature." I can't speak to that but I I've done something similar to what the post was asking about so, as per usual, I thought I'd write about it here.

Earlier today I read Garth Flint's latest post on choosing a Python environment for his classes. While our classes and populations are different it looks like Garth and I share a lot of thoughts on the subject. I started to write a comment to leave on Garth's blog but since it was getting a little long I thought I'd write it up as a post. The question of development environment can be an important one and can make a big difference.

One of the hats I wear at Hunter is to build a new CS Honors program and to bring my particular brand of insanity to Hunter College CS as a whole. Yesterday was my last class for the semester so I thought I'd write a bit about the course. For the Fall semester, I taught an intro programming course to the entire cohort. For some in the cohort, this was their first exposure to CS.

I got some nice feedback today from a couple of disparate places. It was another reminder that being a teacher isn't just about the kids currently in your class but it's about who you are and everyone you interact with. It's not just about teaching a subject but rather about helping people get to where they can potentially go. About a year ago I started putting together a series of posts and videos showing how I use Emacs.

Last Friday, Mark Guzdial wrote about the woes of using clickers in a class. The amount of effort required to use his school's approved clicker technology sounds ridiculous so while we need tools to better engage students in large class settings we need better tools that can be integrated into our classes more easily. I've never used clickers. On top of stories like Mark's, there are a number of problems with using clickers in a public school.

Today was the last day of classes at Hunter thus ending my first semester of teaching at Hunter College. I very much enjoyed the semester and my class and look forward to working with the same group when the spring term starts in a few weeks. At the same time, even though I'm a quarter century veteran teacher, in many ways this was like my rookie season all over again.

The day after Labor Day. The day NYC teachers traditionally return to work. For the first time in a quarter century, I'm not one of them. It's weird. Instead, I'm in the second week of Hunter College's fall semester. So far so good on that front. I'm getting to know my students, planning activities and overall having a good time. But, I do have to reflect on some of the things I'm not going to get to do this week:

If I look at my leaving Stuyvesant and the NYC Department of Education to join Hunter College as the end of Act I of my teaching career, then our family's West Coast swing was a nice way to pull down the curtain. The impetus for the trip was visiting Batya - she's interning at Facebook this summer and having an absolute blast. The plan was to spend a few days in San Francisco, then a little south to Mountain View, where Batya was staying, and then fly up to Seattle for a couple of days.