It's always been a challenge to get students to buy in to an out of class communication tool. Over the years I've tried many including mailing lists, Piazza, Discourse, Vanilla and other discussion forums, Slack and probably a few other things. I guess it's not surprising that it's a hard sell - prior to the internet once school was out kids there as no teacher student interaction until the next school day and kids would only interact with their direct friends.

Teachers are back and students will soon follow either in person or remote. In person means in person one or two days a week with the rest of the time from home. This of course shows horrible leadership. It fails in terms of education, safety and even freeing up parents to get back to work. After all, if your kid is only in school one or two days a week it hardly allows you to get back to your own full time job.

I was talking in our Curriculum Development class last week about the courses I've created over the years. From the first computer graphics course to the current teacher education courses. JonAlf pointed out that we missed an "important" occasion last spring - the twenty fifth offering of my computer graphics class at Stuy. I haven't taught it in almost 10 years but it's been running continuously for a quarter century since it first ran back in the mid 90s.

I primarily program in four languages these days - Clojure C++ Python Java And most of the time, my Emacs configuration has handled each one differently. Cider for Clojure, Irony for C++, Elpy and Jedi for Python and Java I could never figure out. This is of course on top of tools that work across languages like company for completions, or flycheck for general language syntax checking. A while ago I heard about lsp-mode - Language Server Protocol mode.

We used Zoom for remote classes over the summer but at this point, I've also used Coding Rooms, Big Blue Button, and Google meet as well. They each have their own strong points and failings but all are limited in terms of sharing multiple cameras and screen components. All will let you share your camera or share your screen and when you share you screen you can either share it all or a single window.

Thursday was the first day of the new semester. The big change was that my classes were done remotely but there were also some other differences. Other changes were that I only met one of my two CS classes on Thursday. That's my CS0. I'm also teaching a recitation for CS1 which only meets once a week. I'll see those students as well as my CS0 students for a second time on Monday.

It's been a long year since March. Many of us have not really been able to leave NYC for a variety of reasons - financial, professional, or family to name a few. Other than a couple of small escapes in the last two weeks we've been home and working from home in our Manhattan apartment since this all started. Early on we didn't get out much and we still aren't and that does take its toll.

Since we ended up with an eight post postmortem on our CS Teaching Certificate summer intensive I thought I'd add add an index page. Here are links to each post: Introduction - program overview On pedagogy - CS teaching methods Topics in Computer Science Deciding on which methods to teach Commentary on selected CS topics Tools for remote instruction Building a community of CS teachers The good, the bad, and what's next I also wrote a few posts as the summer intensive was running:

Looking back, what worked and what didn't? Overall, things went very well. We were extremely happy with the cohort's growth and performance and based on feedback received they were happy with the program so far. I'll also say that while they're not finished yet, I can honestly say that every one of them would be a boon to any school in the city in need of a CS teacher (but they're not available since they're all already teaching CS at their respective schools :-)).

What so many non-teachers just don't get is culture and community can be so much more powerful than curriculum. The problem is, culture and community are harder to create, curate, and maintain and the results don't always show up on standardized tests. You can't force community or culture in a classroom but you can try your best to foster it. It's ultimately up to the class as a whole. It's like I tell groups who come to events I organize.