The hot debate this past week in NY Education circles is Mayoral Control. When I started teaching, New York City schools were controlled by the Board of Education. The board appointed a chancellor. The system was supposed to balance community control as well as some centralized decision making. The system was created in the late 60s and was entrenched through my schooling. By the time I was a teacher I think it was pretty much a given that the system didn't work.

I've been trying to be an active participant on the CS Educators StackExchange. You should try to as well!!! I answered a question about using the command line which led to a back and forth. I gave an example of something I might do in class to illustrate the power of using the command line and linked to some of my past posts. There was some back and forth in the comments - some of the participants weren't happy with my code as they felt it was filled with poor coding practices.

One of the things I mentioned in my post on the CS Educators StackExchange was the fragmentation of resources for CS Educators. My friend and fellow CS teacher Ben pointed out that this is appropriate as we're so young as a community. He's absolutely right but until we mature, discover-ability can be a problem. We all have our resources and I for one am frequently surprised when talking to a friend and discovering that they don't know about a site or a mailing list that I've known about for years.

The CS Educators StackExchange is now in public beta. For those of you who are not in tech, StackExchange is a network of question answering sites. StackOverflow is probably the most famous - many peoples go to site for computer science and programming questions and answers. During this period of public beta the site will be working on defining itself and also on developing a critical mass of users. I hope the site succeeds and I encourage everyone to check it out, ask questions, answer some and let's all see where this goes.

A couple of quick, unrelated packages today. first up, ibuffer. If you keep Emacs open all the time, you'll start to accumulate buffers. Last time, I talked about using projectile and how that can help when navigating between buffers. IBuffer is another one. Out of the box, C-x C-b is bound to the Emacs list-buffers command. It brings up a buffer with all the buffers listed inside it. You can navigate that buffer and hit enter on a particular buffer to go to it.

Over on Facebook, a fellow CS educator 1 made a comment on something he wanted to try with his students this summer: having the students pre-disclose bugs when they submit their projects. The post was asking for any links to "the literature." I can't speak to that but I I've done something similar to what the post was asking about so, as per usual, I thought I'd write about it here.

Over on the CS Educator StachExchange, which is in private beta for a few more days, I saw a post asking about how to introduce the A* search algorithm. I taught A* as part of the APCS class at Stuy so I thought I'd talk about what I did here. Some time around mid year, we get to intermediate recursion. This is about the time, give or take, when we talk about the nlogn sorts.

Earlier today I read Garth Flint's latest post on choosing a Python environment for his classes. While our classes and populations are different it looks like Garth and I share a lot of thoughts on the subject. I started to write a comment to leave on Garth's blog but since it was getting a little long I thought I'd write it up as a post. The question of development environment can be an important one and can make a big difference.

One of the hats I wear at Hunter is to build a new CS Honors program and to bring my particular brand of insanity to Hunter College CS as a whole. Yesterday was my last class for the semester so I thought I'd write a bit about the course. For the Fall semester, I taught an intro programming course to the entire cohort. For some in the cohort, this was their first exposure to CS.

I got some nice feedback today from a couple of disparate places. It was another reminder that being a teacher isn't just about the kids currently in your class but it's about who you are and everyone you interact with. It's not just about teaching a subject but rather about helping people get to where they can potentially go. About a year ago I started putting together a series of posts and videos showing how I use Emacs.