About a month ago, I talked about using real data with our intro classes. After looking at the correlation between school’s SAT scores and free and reduced lunch rates, it was time to turn the students loose. The assignment: Find some interesting data out and do something with it. Make a web page that shows what you did and what you discoverde. We had already looked at the NYC Data Mine as well as a few other sources but students were encouraged to find new data sourcess.

## The Problem: The buzz word is “accountability.” Why are teachers special? Why don’t they feel they need to be evaluated like other professionals? Why do they feel they need a “job for life?” Of course, the job for life line is nonsense – teachers have tenure, but that’s just due process - not a guarantee of a job. Friends in the private sector ask “if a teacher is doing a good job, why do they need tenure?

Earlier in the term, our intro classes spent a little time learning some basic HTML. We don’t spend a lot of time on it, just enough so that the students can present their work in a static web site. The end goal, though, was to programatically generate the web sites - there’s nothing quite as empowering to a student as when they can present their work to the world. Finally, it’s all coming together.

When looking for assignments for our classes, in addition to trying to craft assignments that develop and reinforce key ideas, we also strive to come up with ideas that “speak” to the students and keep their interest. We write small games, use problems within the student’s experiences, and in general try to find problems that are appealing. This is much easier to do when the kids can read data from a file.

Last week was crazy. Busy, stressful, late night after late night. It ended, though, on a great note. A young lady in my intro class found me in my office near the end of the day: Student: Mr. Z, I wanted to make sure to catch you before vacation! Me: What’s up? Student: I wanted to tell you that today’s lesson was AWESOME!!!!!! Wow. I’ve been teaching 23 years and that’s never happened before!

Today I had the privilege of attending my second live State of the City address. Mayor Bloomberg didn’t spend as much time on education as he did at last year’s address but he did take a moment to give a shout out to charter schools. It gets old hearing the same false story about how charters are better than public schools. At least we have people like Gary Rubinstein and Diane Ravitch trying to set the record straight.

Inspired by the likes of Jon Simantov and David Lerner as well as the greater Stuy CS family, a few of us have been working on CSTUY, Computer Science and Technology for Urban Youth. Yeah, we backed into the acronym. Let's bring Stuy CS out of Stuy so we can work on inspiring a wider range of students. Well, last Wednesday we had our inaugural event. Hosted by NY TechStars (thanks Moisey), we invited 75 youngsters to an evening of talks.

I tell my students “the cool thing about what we do is that if we’re not happy with the way something works, we’ve got a shot at fixing it.” That came up this morning so I thought I’d share. I recently posted about the in-term projects my Software Development kids were working on. Well, now it’s time to grade their final projects. The code is up on GitHub. This morning I was faced with independently going to every project page and cloning each one:

A little over a year ago, I decided it was time to reach out to my alums, a group I refer to as the “Stuy CS family” and try to get us together. The most rewarding part of my job involves the relationships I’ve developed over the years but is was always between me and my alums and them to their classmates. This was an attempt to start building a network that spanned the years.

My last post I was talking about the fact that as teachers, our knowledge and experience is frequently trivialized. The tenor of the times is that anyone can design a course, anyone can teach, and in fact, we don't even need teachers, just videos or computer based systems. If you've ever tutored a friend, you're more than qualified. That might be a strong statement but everywhere you look you see "