Time to follow up on my last post and all the surrounding discussion. To be honest, I was a bit surprised at first to see that many posters were all for what I consider a weak program. I think all of us agreed that you want and need a gentle entry - you have to be accessible to teachers with little or even no prior computer science experience but I was taken back by the number of teachers who thought it was fine to have a graduate level program where the teachers end up with no more knowledge than a high school student taking APCS-A.

A friend's post brought my attention to a new graduate CS Education Certificate program. It's not a New York State program so isn't in competition with what I do but it's the type of program that I was afraid of. The type that will hurt CS education more than it will help. There was enough discussion following the Facebook post that I thought I'd write about it here. Before talking about the program itself, one issue that came up multiple times in the Facebook thread is that old red herring - we can't teach teachers real CS because if they know the real deal they'll all go into industry.

Over on Facebook the semi-regular "is APCS-A going to Python" once again appeared. I'm not going to get into Python vs Java. Each language giveth and each language taketh away but it got me thinking about the history of language changes. I titled this "Language choices for APCS" not APCS-A because back in the day it was just APCS. At some point that split with APCS-A being similar to what we have today and APCS-A being that plus a CS2 (data structures) class.

I don't usually talk politics on this blog but it is the news of the day. We truly are at a turning point in this country and we should all be concerned with the road we take. Yesterday the media outlets called the election for Biden/Harris. It's not over but I thought this would be as good a time as any to share some thoughts and more importantly concerns.

I read a post on /r/emacs the other day asking if people used Emacs bookmarks among other things. I thought about it for a bit and wondered why I didn't use Bookmarks? I did set a few bindings to load frequently used files and those are like bookmarks but I have to set those up in my configuration. It turns out that Emacs bookmarks are pretty easy and effective and work right out of the box.

In the 10 plus years of this blog I've never done a post on my birthday. Okay, maybe I've written one on my birthday but never talked about it. Why this year? No particular reason. Maybe because I'm getting older. I'm 53 today. Devorah will turn 54 in a month - from there one year until she can retire. I can follow a year later. I'm pretty happy with what I'm doing but it's nice to know that in two years I'll have a lot of options on the table.

I think many of us are finding student engagement to be one of the more challenging aspects of remote teaching. I sure am. In person it's much easier to have in class discussions. You can read faces and body language, move around the room, encourage cross discussion and, well, you know, teach in the usual sense. Much harder on Zoom. The default behavior isn't a room of people all together but rather a bunch of individual teacher student connections.

As we move through Fall, I'm missing one of the most draining but at the same time one of my favorite parts of the year. School recruiting visits. When I came to Hunter, I started the Daedalus CS Honors program. We started small but now, each year, we take in about fifty students, give them a laptop and a scholarship and all sorts of extras and bring them in for a great CS education at a fraction of the cost of say NYU or Columbia.

A few days ago I was part of a Twitter discussion on assignment deadlines. I noticed a tweet: Not sure who needs to hear this, but stop taking off points for late assignments. It’s not helping students learn responsibility, and it’s not making your job easier. It’s only making your class inequitable. 💯 — Sydney Jensen (@sydneycjensen) September 26, 2020 I disagreed. I wasn't necessarily against floating or open deadlines without deductions but rather, they made my life more difficult and weren't in the best interest of my students.

Quick Emacs hit today. After my last video, I received a comment noting that I was using ibuffer and that there was another package I might want to consider - bufler. I started with basic ibuffer and then started to customize it to group buffers but that was always somewhat finicky. More often than not I couldn't tune it the way I wanted. Most recently, I started using ibuffer-projectile which group projects for me but lost the other customizations.