It's hard to believe that this is my 25th year teaching and that my first StuyCS class graduated in June 1995. It's really hard to believe that I'm now looking at the end of a significant part of my life and career. Over the summer, Mariya, Kachun, and Stella, all writers for Stuy's Spectator worte an article that chronicled StuyCS. It's a really nice piece. It skirted the battles I've had and the fact that we get no love or support from Stuy or the DOE, but still, as I said, it's a really nice piece.

I wanted to do a couple more posts on the CSTUY summer program SHIP, particularly about getting funding and reflections but I think I'll just wrap things up with the school year starting. Overall it was an amazing success and I'm amazingly proud of the entire team (in no particular order): Devorah, JonAlf, Sam, Yulia, Topher, Ethan, Leslie, Brian, Andreas, Natan, Miranda, Nadia, Fawn, Lise, Jessica, Angela, Benedict, Elise, Fish, and Derek.

A while back I posted about the new teacher evaluation system in New York. I originally wrote about the system here and a little more here. Well, the results are in and I got my evaluation. What type of teacher am I? According to New York City I'm "Effective," which is basically run of the mill. Let's look a little deeper. At the end of the day, each teachers receive a numeric score from 0 to 100.

Test results are in: The other week, the NY State third through eight grade high stakes test results were released. This was immediately followed by the usual spin an posturing. The reformers privatizers would claim things like "These charter schools did better than those public schools" while people like me would say "Those charter schools have different populations" and so on. As you know, I've never bought into the "

The Crew One of the most important, possibly the most important part of SHIP's success was the crew and that's what sets us apart. I've seen CS Ed organizations run by business people, lawyers, investors and more.The people developing curriculum are EdTech people, entrepreneurs and anything but seasoned educators. I've seen programs developed, curriculum created and then the search for teachers commence. Ofttimes real educators aren't involved at all.

From the day we filed the paperwork to create CSTUY, we knew we wanted to run a summer program. In fact, we started looking for a space during the 2012/2013 school year. We were hoping to run SHIP for the first time in the summer of 2013 but we all knew it wasn't really a realistic goal. Our original plans required at least one classroom sized space, and up to three for full days for a month.

SHIP ended last week. So, how did we do? Time to look at outcomes. Outcomes can be tricky. There are lots of programs out there and they all claim amazing results. Unfortunately, it seems to me, that everyone's so concerned with good PR that, well, you know, lies, damned lies, statistics. First you've got claims like "learn how to make a mobile app in under n weeks." I always chuckle at this.

We're almost at the end of CSTUY SHIP's first journey. The Shipmates and stewards will be showing off their work in another day or so and I'm excited to see their finished projects. But what toolset are they using. With knew we would be working with two rooms of relative beginners. We needed something that allowed us to develop the shipmates CS skills while also having a low cost of entry.

We've got a few more topics to cover in the Building a SHIP series. We still have to cover: The Crew Curricular Choices The long term plan Site and funding But for today, we'll talk outreach. Outreach proved to be particular challenge for SHIP. Our entire crew is made up of teachers. That meant that we couldn't communicate with schools during business hours. That made things particularly tough. I could send emails after hours or set up emails to be sent at specific times during the day, but we couldn't call while at our day jobs.