I've taken part in a few conversations and read more than a few threads on teacher certification exams recently. Specifically, CS teacher certification exams. There are a bunch of them floating around. There's the Praxis offered by ETS, the one from the National Evaluation Series, the Washington Evaluator Test Series one and then there's what's going on in Texas. NY State says it will eventually develop their own. I have mixed feelings about exams like these.

As I mentioned in my last post, this coming weekend is the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) conference. I've been a member of CSTA since the beginning but this will be only the second time I've made it to the annual conference. The CSTA conference might be the largest conference specifically for k12 computer science teachers and that makes it different from conferences like SIGCSE which is for CS education and education research at all levels or ISTE which seems to be more of an Ed Tech conference.

Next weekend I'll be attending the Computer Science Teachers Association's annual conference. It's probably the biggest conference focussed on K12 Computer Science education. This year, in addition to attending, I'll be giving a talk on preservice and inservice CS teacher preparation programs. I'll be talking about the new New York State certification requirements along with what we're rolling out at Hunter College. This means putting together a slide deck for the session.

Yesterday I was back on campus for an early orientation session for Hunter's incoming Daedalus CS honors students. It was the first time all of us got to meet face to face. The students I met with will be my third cohort. I got to thinking how far we've come in under three years. Hunter's had a strong but little known undergraduate CS program for as long as I've known.

I saw a couple of tweets from Sarah Judd this morning: A lot of CS Ed PD assumes you are new to CS. I really want CS Ed PD for people like us that came from a CS background and want to understand the pedagogy for CS in particular better. Do you know of some? — Sarah Judd (@SarahEJudd) June 27, 2018 Yes! I love SIGCSE and CSTA. I just feel like.

I've been using Emacs for email for a couple of years now. Not for everything, for now my personal email is still Gmail but work is sent and read through Emacs. I'm currently using mu4e and while it has a few quirks and limitations, I like it very much. You can take a look on how I configure and use it here. The other day I saw this thread on Emacs about a new package - mu4e-conversation.

Time to get back to CS and CS Ed related blogging. Last week, in Garth Flint's post about his summer plans, Garth mentioned wanting to get his head around Object Oriented Programming and possibly taking a course to help him get there. I thought I'd talk a little about how I got my head around OOP here and some of the difficulties I faced then and what people might face now.

Yesterday I shared my thoughts on Bill de Blasio's plans to "fix" the selection criteria for New York City's specialized high schools. If you haven't read the post, you can find it here. I was going to get back to CS and CS Ed related blogging today but there's more to the story. In spite of what BdB stated, it's not enough for him to switch to another measure - the middle school state exam along with some modifiers.

Yesterday, Bill de Blasio, the current Mayor of New York City outlined how he would "fix" our specialized schools. The schools he was referring to were the "big three" of Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech and then five additional schools - The High School for Math Science and Engineering at CCNY, The High School for American Studies at Lehman, Brooklyn Latin, The Queens Arts and Science High School at York College, and Staten Island Tech.

Every morning one of the first things I do is quickly glance at my emails and other notifications. I really should wait until I'm more awake but old habits die hard. As some of you know over the past couple of years I've been making a series of videos and related post on using my editor of choice, Emacs. I've done 48 videos, have over 2500 subscribers on YouTube and people seem to find some value from the series.