It's 10:00am and I'm sitting in my hotel room in Barcelona. For the past few years, Devorah and I have taken a trip to someplace warmer (but not necessarily warm) in late January or early February. Something we could never do before retiring and this year, we decided in Barcelona and Madrid because airfare and hotel prices were just so low - cheaper than the things we were first considering doing in our own country.

Over a month since my last post. Wow. Anyway, last week was full of Artificial Intelligence events. On Wednesday, I attended a talk by Ray Kurzweil, hosted by Trinity High School - a posh private school on the Upper West Side, The Academy for Teachers, and Teach for America. Thursday was a StuyCS event which was really about early stage startups but much of the discussion revolved around AI and Friday was a meeting of CUNY CS educators where the topic of the day was, of course, AI - I was there to pitch, well, Pitchfest.

Last week my StuyCS family community had a discussion about Zohran Mamdani's plans for gifted education. For people outside of New York, Mamdani is the Democratic candidate for mayor and there was a recent article outlining his plans or rather, his positions on gifted ed - always a hot button topic for Stuy alums. It also turns out to be a hot button topic in education in general in New York.