This morning, Devorah, Batya, and I drove up to Hunter to start to clean out my office - the next step in officially becoming retired. I wasn't really looking forward to it. When I moved from Stuy to Hunter it was something of a rush so I basically boxed everything up that I thought I wanted to keep and moved it to the new digs. So, three decades worth of accumulated crap to deal with.

Last weekend I attended the AI X Education Conference - an online conference on, well, AI in education. There were some talks about AI and generative AI in particular but really the split was that Saturday was focused on college education and Sunday on K12. I only caught a bit of each day but fortunately, the sessions were recorded. Two in particular or more specifically two specific speakers, one in a K12 STEM education session and another in a humanities education session caught my attention.

Two more videos to finish up the rot13 project. The first video covers about prefix arguments. The idea is when calling an Emacs function interactively, you can specify a numeric argument either by typing C-u # where # is a single digit or M-x ## where ## is an integer which can be positive, negative, single or multiple digits. You then type the key for your command or invoke it with its full name M-x.

Rather than one long boring video, I thought it would be better to split up the remainder of the Rot13 project into 4 shorter boring ones :-). Here are the first two. Before we can really do anything interesting, we need to be able write programs that make decisions. For that we need conditionals or if statements. That's covered in the first video. Like other languages, elisp has an if statement but it's more of an if function.

I've said multiple times that I don't believe in "Best Practices." I believe there are practices that can be strong when employed in specific situations. I was reminded of this when I saw a reddit thread yesterday where teachers were sharing "best practices" that were forced on them by their administrators or districts, usually due to "the research" that just didn't work for them. One in particular that stood out to me was Proficiency Grading, also known as Standards Based Grading, Mastery Grading, Competency Based Grading, Everybody gets A's, and probably other monikers.

Now that I've got a little more free time and energy I decided to get working on a short video series on elisp - the language that's built in to and intertwined with the Emacs editor. As I've been thinking through and starting the series I started to think about the design decisions, big and small, one makes when designing a class, unit or lesson. I know many teachers are forced to teach scripted, canned curricula these days but the act of developing something and delivering it is so much more interesting and I dare say better for students.

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post. Sorry - been repainting the apartment so I was limited to my laptop for a while. Now that we've gone over a few basics we can explore new elisp features while building "useful" things. This video has us building code to implement ROT13. ROT13 is a particular instance of a Caesar or rotational cipher. In a Caesar Cipher, you take each letter and "rotate" it by a certain number of places.

Here's another short video - this one on declaring functions in elisp. Not much to say about it. It's similar to other languages. In Python or C++ you might have: # Python def add2(a, b): return a+b // C++ int add2(int a, int b){ return a+b; } Elisp is similar: (defun add2 (a b) (+ a b)) But it's a little more "mathy." You've got the special form defun, then the name of the function, parameters in parens and then the body - all wrapped in parentheses.

I was planning on writing this yesterday but caught up in watching "Paths of Glory." The plan was to have each topic revolve around a "real" project but I realized that first we have to cover some basics. Specifically, variables and functions. I was going to cover them together but the video was getting a little long so we're doing variables here and writing functions next time. Like other languages, Emacs uses variables to store values.

I wanted to get back to my post on the "hard" AP question. Specifically I wanted to reflect on what AP exams can and can't actually tell us and what purpose they serve, can serve, or should serve. First let's make sure we're on the same page about what the College Board is offering - they offer single end of semester high stakes exams. These exams provide a single number between 1 and 5 that, in theory, signify how well an exam taker knows the subject.