I've been on both sides of the recommendation game. I currently read all the recommendations for students who apply to my honors CS program at Hunter and some of the ones written for the Macaulay Honors program. I also read some for the CSTUY summer program. On the other side, I've written hundreds if not thousands of recs for seniors when I was teaching at Stuy. I've been meaning to write about recs and when I saw yesterday's post on AVC.

Advanced Placement Computer Science got top billing on Alfred Thompson's Things I'm Watching in 2017 post. Alfred talks about how APCS-P exploded onto the scene and wonders what will happen with APCS this year. I have some questions as well but mine won't be answered for years to come, if ever. Like it or not, the College Board has an out sized influence on K12 education. As long as people are convinced that AP=good there will be a push for more and more AP classes and APCS-P is a perfect class to push.

This past year I recorded 14 Using Emacs videos. This is on top of the 25 videos I made last year. The fall off in production is understandable. I got through my day to day configuration in the late 20s and since then the videos have just been on things I've rediscovered, things that became useful and things that I just found interesting. It was also a busier year.

It's been a big year for K12 CS education. More and more states looking into CS as a K12 academic area and all that entails, the CS4All movement is well underway and the College Board launched a new exam. These are just three of many big things that happened in the past year. I'm excited about the overall growth but concerned about a number of issues. I've written about all of them in the past so won't rehash here and in any event, the issues I'm concerned about are issues I have no influence on.

I usually don't do year in review posts. At Stuy, not much changed year after year so I never felt it worth summarizing the past and projecting the future. At Hunter, now that I'm a couple of years in, projects are really picking up steam so I think it's worth talking about them. One of my two major missions at Hunter was to build a CS Honors program and raise the profile of Hunter's undergraduate CS program in general.

I generally use three email accounts. My personal one, work one, and one for my non-profit. For a couple of years, I've been using mu4e under Emacs for both my work and non-profit email accounts and gmail for my personal account. I've had lots of requests for a video on what I do but I've been hesitant for two reasons: There are parts of my configuration that are copied from others and I really don't understand.

In the New York City department of education a recurring hot topic is the Absent Teacher Reserve or ATR pool. A teacher or administrator in the ATR pool is a licensed, most likely tenured teacher not assigned permanently to a school. Each year these educators get shuttled from school to school and denied a chance to actually settle in a position. The ATR pool was created under the Bloomberg administration.

This question appeared on Facebook a few days ago: Does anyone have an effective way to teach students how to break down a problem into steps and then solve each step one by one? I think my students are struggling with a large question and breaking it in subsequent parts. There were some good suggestions. I wanted to add something but didn't have time then so I thought I'd write it up now.

Last April I woke up early and trekked up to Albany along with a few of my Hunter College colleagues to share our thoughts on K12 Computer Science teacher certification with the Board of Regents. We gave a presentation to the Regents Higher Education Committee and afterwards had a chance to talk with some of the Regents as well as other members of the New York State Department of Education.

I'm now well behind in Advent of Code. Traveling up to Michigan to see my son and my brother and his family will do that. I was planning on working to catch up but got distracted earlier by this thread on the Advent of Code subreddit. Specifically this comment by Eric Wastl, the contest creator. The thread is about the level of difficulty of the various problems and Eric's comment talks about some of the factors that go into creating a good collection of problems for a contest and the difficulties involved.