Yesterday Mark Guzdial blogged about a NY Times piece discussing Silicon Valleys influence on education through Code.org. Mark questioned the validity of the piece. If you don't read Mark's blog and you're in CS Ed you probably should. I tried to leave a comment on Mark's blog - not about the NY Times article but rather my thoughts on why I think it's important that we remain wary and vigilant to industry and outsiders influence and impact on CS education and on education in general.

Brenda Wilkerson, Director of CS and IT education for Chicago public schools was one of the keynote speakers at this year's CSTA conference. During her talk, she made a comment about it taking three times through to get it right so if you're working hard and struggling in your first year of teaching CS, it's not the time to give up. Learning to teach takes time. She's absolutely correct. I saw this in myself and I've seen this in many other young teachers.

For anyone involved in K12 CS education, the past few years have been a wild ride. When I first tried to make inroads in the DOE decades ago I couldn't get through the door. Now, CS Education is everyone's darling. It's really amazing. It's been a combination of grass roots efforts by teachers, non profit education efforts such as TEALS, advocacy of groups like Code.org and amazing individuals like Fred Wilson who has probably done more to move the needle of CS Ed in NY than any other 10 people combined.

Another set of tweets god me thinking: How do we help school administrators help and evaluate CS teachers? asks @lsudol of @CSForAll #csta2017 Many don't understand CS — Alfred Thompson (@alfredtwo) July 10, 2017 If the current system is any indication, checklists are not the answer — Mike Zamansky (@zamansky) July 15, 2017 I get the intent. CS teachers should be evaluated by people who have some clue about the subject.

I was part of this conversation the other day: When science teachers asked me if I taught AP Java I'd always respond by asking them if they taught AP Microscope. — Mike Zamansky (@zamansky) July 7, 2017 I always use that line to emphasize that I teach CS - a way of thinking and problem solving and looking at the world. The languages we use in our classes are tools to help us communicate ideas not the ends but rather a means.

You've probably seen an image like this: It's what you see when you try to access a secure web site but the web site itself certified itself as being secure. When people see this on a professional site it sets off all manner of red flags. We feel much more comfortable when go to a site and we don't see that error. When we see the secure green lock in the url bar indicating that this site is certified through an external trusted source.

AP scores just came out. As usual, I see the posts and take part in conversations where teachers talk about their results. Some are happy about their results, some aren't, some don't really care. I just want to make a plea to all AP teachers out there: Don't let your value be dictated by the college board or any other exam. I never really cared much about my students' actual AP scores.

Is it easier to take CS people and teach them to teach or is it easier to take teachers and teach them CS? The question gets batted around from time to time. This time via twitter: Some think it's easier to teach a teacher to teach CS than to teach a CS pro to teach. @alfredtwo is not one of them https://t.co/QCUP8d8llZ — Diane Levitt (@diane_levitt) July 3, 2017 Agreed.

Very little new Emacs in today's episode of Using Emacs. The video shows my old blogging workflow and what I'm playing with now. The only new Emacs covered is the prodigy package which lets you run services under Emacs. I use it to run Nikola's development server but I think prodigy will also be useful when I start writing that knitting application I promised my wife. When I started this blog, I used Jekyll.

Back in February, I shared my thoughts on losing CS teachers to the tech industy. TL;DR - I don't think it will be a CS Ed problem. That said, I do think that it will be hard to find good CS teachers but the reason is because it will get harder and harder to find good teachers in general. There are plenty of reasons why it's harder to become a career teacher but I don't want to talk about those today.