So, it's Computer Science Education Week. Full of rah rah events and everyone's gung ho about teaching computer science. You all know that CS Ed is what I've dedicated most of my life to and maybe that's why I'm "not feeling it" in terms of CS Ed Week. Let me explain. Yesterday there was a Twitter Conversation led by a "national panel of thought leaders in the field." Click on the link.

This post was supposed to be about varsity academic teams but I wanted to share something else first. For years I was unhappy with our "research" course but due to the misguided views of our past administration, I pretty much had to keep it running. Over the same time, I was frustrated by the fact that there was so much missing in our students computer science related education. Specifically, kids don't really get to experience creating large "

I’ve never been a huge fan of the way we do varsity sports, and I say this as a guy that coached for a number of years. In NYC, we’re governed by the Public School Athletic League or PSAL. Practice time and lack of facilities make teaching difficult, but my biggest problem is the fact that most teams cut, that is, if you’re not in the top “n,” you’re out. So, if our basketball team has, let’s say 15 kids on it, they get exclusive use of the gym every afternoon during basketball season and no one else can receive coaching or be part of the team.

The day before Thanksgiving is always fun. For as long as I can remember, recent graduates descend upon Stuy. For the most part, they mull around the senior bar but we get our share up in 301. This year was a little quiet but I got to see more than my share of graduates over the weekend as I attended the 2002 and 2007 class reunions. I’ve only been invited to a handful of reunions and really consider it an honor when I am.

## On going back to work today Since school was still out due to Sandy, we ran a second online class yesterday. At the end of the session, which I’ll summarize below, I told the class what I wanted them to accomplish today and over the weekend. One student queried “you mean no class on Friday :-(?” Alas no – while students aren’t reporting to school this morning, teachers are.

Here's what the bridge leading across the West Side Highway over to Stuy during the storm. Hence the title with the weak tech reference. The storm has kept the schools closed all week so it's as good a time as any to try to resurrect this blog. As you can see, I've moved from blogger to a Jekyll based blog hosted on Github. I'm really liking the way it works but more on that at a later date.

Sorry for the weak title and movie reference. It's teacher appreciation week -- one of our lesser celebrated weeks. I'm waiting for the annual letter we get from the chancellor. Given the level of teacher bashing over the last few years, I've recently found their emails amusing. I though I'd take the time to thank a few of my most influential teachers. To paraphrase: whatever good I've been able to do, it has been because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.

Shortly after our event at Foursquare, I was chatting with Kevin Friedman (Stuy '96). Kevin's startup is Cojourneo and since it has an educational bent, he thought I might be interested in hearing about it. I certainly was. Rather than visiting Kevin, I thought it would be fun to have him come down after school, present Cojourneo to any students that wanted to stay late and then field questions.

Anyone can cook - Chef Gusteau These days the rage seems anyone can code. On line attempts to teach coding and computing abound. We've got Udacity and Coursera trying to bring college level academic offerings to the masses on one extreme and more down to earth "learn to code" efforts with Codecademy getting the most press. While I applaud any effort to make knowledge more accessible, there are a lot of unanswered questions as to the effectiveness of these latest attempts.

"... the standardized courses don't shed much light on future opportunities and they make it hard for students to identify what they're most interested in. The CS department, on the other hand, is great at demonstrating all the things that are going on in the modern comp sci world." -- Asa, one of our current CS students. Asa's comment was in response to an event we held last Tuesday. We brought 100 current students up to FourSquare along with 100 of our CS alums for a mixer.