Today was a "professional development day." That means that instead of teaching, we were supposed to work on our craft. Rather than the normal nonsense - forcing CS teachers to sit through common core math lectures or how to use the latest calculator, our host principal, Randy Asher, of Brooklyn Tech let us do our thing. Basically, it was a bunch of CS teachers from two schools - Stuy and Brooklyn Tech, talking shop for most of the day.

As a teacher, sometimes your gut tells you to do something and it turns out to be a really good idea. That's what happened in October, 1994. I decided to dress up as Groo the Wanderer for Halloween. I never dressed in costume for school before and back then, no many did. A few students and very few teachers. Afterwards, I noticed that my younger students - the ones that didn't know me that well yet, really loosened up and so a tradition was born.

It's Halloween again. This time, "Inside Out." No video yet, but stay tuned. For the time being, enjoy some of our past madness:

A good workman is known by his tools, or so the saying goes. My tools of choice are my terminal shell and Emacs. I suppose if I was a full time developer working with a limited set of tools I might like an IDE like JetBrains or Eclipse but no matter how many alternatives I try, I always end back in Emacs. I recommend that my students spend time not only in Emacs but also in tools like Vim or Sublime Text.

While looking over my tweet stream, I noticed this: RSVP today for the K-12 CS Education Panel, presented by @Uber + @FlatironSchool: https://t.co/nVBbSbRn9d pic.twitter.com/NAxowSIfff — Flatiron School (@FlatironSchool) October 26, 2015 So, on November 12, one can head over to Uber and listen to three experts talk about K12 CS Education. To quote the landing page: How can we engage our students in CS, and train our teachers to teach it?

Scale, scale, scale. Scripted lessons. Online resources, Moocs. No excuses schools. All of these are modern trends in education. None of these are about good education. It's really demoralizing reading article after article devaluing true master teachers and real education. So, last night was a real pleasure. I attended a talk, given by Alan Alda on communicating science. The talk was sponsored by The Academy for Teachers. I grew up watching Hawkeye on MASH and more recently Arnold Vinick on The West Wing but Mr.

Just had an interesting conversation with Chris, one of our CSTUY mentors. Chris is working with one of our more advanced groups of hackers - they'll be creating a web based app that with ultimately be deployed as mobile using PhoneGap. The question he had was "Angular.js or Backbone.js." Chris and I have had this conversation before. I was explaining at the time why I preferred to use Backbone.

The other day codehs made an announcement about their new autograder. Fellow CS Teaching veteran Alfred Thompson had his say up on his blog where he talked about Mark Guzdial's comment on autograders leading to less creative assignments. I very much agree that autograders, due to their rigidness lend themselves to less creative projects, but thought I'd write up a few of my own thoughts on autograders. First and foremost, I HATE GRADING.

I won't be teaching my regular classes tomorrow. I'll be meeting all my kids but classes will only be 12 minutes long. So, how will my colleagues and I spend the rest of the day? Proctoring the PSAT. This has always been a sore point with me. Back in the day, many schools, Stuy included, offered the PSAT on the weekend. If you wanted to proctor, you'd come in and get paid a little extra.