I got my year-end bonus today. I really hadn’t given it any thought, how it was calculated, where it maxed out, because any company I’ve ever worked with where I was eligible for a bonus, I never got it. And my experience has been that nobody else ever gets the bonus either, with the exception of people in sales and people in the highest echelons of the company. Rank-and-file people don’t get bonuses. If the company wanted to pay you the bonus, they’d make it part of your salary. Anyway . . . I do training classes for software engineers, and it turns out my bonus is calculated based on graduation rate and student surveys, where students respond to statements like “I receive actionable feedback on my performance” on a 5-point scale from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree. I had no idea. As it turns out, I did get the… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Teaching
If You Gotta Go, Go Now
One of my students says she was so frustrated with an assignment she was ready to throw her computer out the window. “What floor do you live on,” I ask. “Second.” “Oh, well that probably wouldn’t kill anyone, just a bump on the noggin. But you can’t say for sure if it hit them just right. Be sure you’re wearing a mask though when you do that.” She lives in New York. My son also lives in New York so I had to call to warn him to be on the lookout for falling computers. “Because I know someone who may be throwing one out a window. But only from the second floor so you’ll probably be able to see it coming and step out of the way.” If I lived in New York and it came down to being killed by COVID or by a falling computer, I’d take… Read more →
See You in Hell, Educators
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Greetings mortals! Even though an alarmingly high percentage of Americans think the sun orbits the earth, can’t find the Pacific Ocean on a map, half the residents of Detroit can’t read, rather than teach basic literacy, science or geography, K-12 public school teachers in the U.S. will be teaching “expanding” gender identities and “evolving” sexual orientations. This instruction will be informed by the National Sex Ed Standards: Core Content and Skills, K-12 (Second Edition) I included a link to it because you will not believe me when I tell you what’s in it. For example: BY THE END OF THE 5TH GRADE, STUDENTS SHOULD BE ABLE TO: Distinguish between sex assigned at birth and gender identity and explain how they may or may not differ. Define and explain differences between cisgender, transgender, gender nonbinary, gender expansive,… Read more →
Healthy Enough to Type
I have a student in my class — let’s call him John — who missed the entire first week, so I sent him an email to the effect that I hadn’t seen him in class yet and what were his plans going forward. He replied that he had really been looking forward to the class but had a health condition that was going to force him to drop and who could he contact about a tuition refund. So he’s healthy enough to type. The class is online, so he could watch from his hospital bed if necessary. In short, I don’t believe him but what can you do? A slightly better way to play it, in my opinion, is to send me back an email saying “I’m typing this for John because he’s too sick to move his fingers. It’s really touch and go at this point. Please remember him… Read more →
Now Here’s a Guy Who Gets Me
I teach programming classes for a living. The classes are 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 12 weeks. I put a lot of preparation into it because I want students to have the best, most up-to-date and relevant instruction. It’s a good job for me. Programming seems to me like an important, valuable skill . . . it’s allowed me to make a living doing (for the most part) things I like and things I’m good at. It gives you a lot of options. You don’t have to work for a tech company. Almost any field of endeavor now uses software and data and they hire programmers. You can work in education, healthcare, finance, sports, whatever energizes you. So it’s good to have a job where I feel like I’m helping people. The downside is that the students can’t really tell good instruction from bad instruction. Yes,… Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: Priorities
When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren. — Albert Shanker, President of the United Federation of Teachers (1964-1984) and President of the American Federation of Teachers (1974-1997) It’s a problem in my profession that the number of schools that want to teach computer science far exceeds the number of computer science majors who want to teach computer science. The opportunity cost is too high. Computer science majors can earn a lot more working as software engineers than working as teachers. I volunteer a couple mornings a week to help with computer science instruction at a local high school. This school has a teacher, originally hired as a math teacher, who must be well into her fourth decade of teaching. She now teaches computer science classes — poorly, but she teaches them. Because of her professional longevity, she makes a six-figure income with… Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: What is a Computer Science Integration Specialist?
Sheena Vaidyanathan, a computer science integration specialist at Los Altos School District in California, says that states, school districts and boards of education have not prioritized computer science education the way they should. Even if not every child will grow up to work as a computer scientist, she thinks everyone should at least get exposure to how computers work. — EdSurge News A couple of things I don’t understand there . . . one is why everyone needs to know “how computers work.” They work on electricity, that’s about all I know about it. Actually, I know a little more than that, but there’s no reason that everyone should know “how computers work,” any more than everyone should know how phones work, or how cars work, or how refrigerators work. You can use things without knowing how they work. I do think everyone can benefit from understanding how programmers think,… Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: Tips and Tricks for the AP CS Principles Performance Tasks
Your most valuable resource for the performance tasks is the AP Computer Science Principles Exam page. Look for the section titled Sample Responses and Scoring Information. There’s a rubric for performance tasks, but they’re graded by humans so scoring is somewhat subjective. This page takes the guesswork out of it. You’ll find multiple student responses from previous exam administrations, including scoring guidelines and commentary. Some of the responses are excellent, some are bad, and the rest are somewhere in-between. But they all come with a detailed explanation for each row of the rubric as to why points were or were not awarded. Don’t submit your performance tasks without ensuring that they most closely resemble the high-scoring examples on this page. Teachers are limited in the type of questions they can answer regarding your performance tasks. It has to be your own work. That being said, if you have a… Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: Inequality = Bad?
I’m volunteering a couple mornings a week in a high school computer science class . . . “Why don’t schools and classes have sponsors?” I ask one of the teachers. “When my kid was in school, they were always complaining about not having enough money. So why couldn’t you, for example, come in and say, ‘Hey kids, before you come to 1st period, make sure you have a good breakfast at McDonald’s. I’m lovin’ it!’? “And McDonald’s pays you 100 grand or whatever to say that.” “My concern,” he says, “is that would lead to more inequality in education.” I’m not sure he really thought that through. It seems more like a mechanical response to an abstract notion, i.e., “Inequality is bad.” As a parent, I always supported inequality in education. I wanted my kid to get the best possible education, better than most other kids. As a classroom volunteer,… Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: You Just Got to Really Want To
I’m volunteering a couple mornings a week in a high school computer science class . . . “Does anyone recognize this gentleman?” No one does. “Any pianists in the class?” About 5 kids raise their hands. “Do you ever go to YouTube and watch videos of pieces that you’re trying to learn?” Yes, they do. “Ok, this is Vladimir Horowitz.” Last time around, no one was able to identify Martha Graham. “I always know the name after you say it though,” one girl says. “Well, there’s more to life than technology, kids. There’s music, art, dance, literature . . . all these things help blow the dust off our ordinary existence. “I’ll get back to Horowitz in a minute. Last time I was here, I heard a conversation about how hard is it to go to college as a CS major. “I have some good news and bad news. I’ll… Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: Say Your Ideas Out Loud
[I learned about Scary Ideas from Jim and Michele McCarthy — PE] I’m volunteering a couple mornings a week in a high school computer science class . . . “The main thing I wanted to tell you is that you’ve got to say your ideas out loud . . . “A scary idea is not an idea that’s going to scare people when they hear it, it’s an idea that you don’t want to say because you’re afraid of how people will react to it. Maybe they’ll think you’re crazy. “Here’s a couple examples of scary ideas. “You recognize the speaker in this video?” Everyone does. “Ok, let’s see what he has to say.” I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. “Keep in mind that he’s… Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: All Are Welcome
I’m volunteering a couple mornings a week in a high school computer science class . . . “Computing,” I tell the class, “is like most professions in that some groups are under-represented and some groups are over-represented. You may have heard that the reason some groups are under-represented is because computing as a profession is more welcoming to some people than others. “I haven’t found that to be the case and I’ll tell you why. “My perspective on this is that if you walk through the workplace at a typical technology company, you won’t see people who look like me. I’m too old and I’ve been too old for quite a while now. At this point, I’m usually old enough to be the CEO’s father. “So to the extent that people want to work with other people who look like them and people who fit into the group, that doesn’t… Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: Don’t Worry About Spelling and Grammar?
The following is part of the Code.org online curriculum, asking students to write a brief reflection on starting a computer science class. That seems like an oddball thing to say in an educational context. “Let’s talk about the instructions here for a minute,” I said to the class. “One: it doesn’t make sense to me to compartmentalize education like this. Like spelling and grammar are only important in an English class and this is not an English class so don’t worry about it. “We’ll be taking a holistic view of education here. I hope you’ll learn some things about computer science but I hope you’ll learn some other things as well. “On a practical note, you may find yourself competing for a job someday, and if it’s a good job, there are likely to be a lot of applicants. “No one wants to read a large number of resumes, so… Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: Why Was I Not Consulted?
I’m volunteering in a high school computer science class a couple mornings a week . . . If you’re going to work with computers, you need to be able to move around between different number systems, most commonly base 10, base 2 and base 16. As a warm-up, I asked students how many ways they could represent the quantity 7. Answers included the word “seven,” roman numerals, seven dots, a septagon, a Chinese symbol, and so on. “Quantities exist naturally,” I said, “but number systems are man-made. They’re just a set of symbols along with an agreement about how to order them. Why do we use the number system that we do? Who decided that?” Because I phrased it in a provocative way, some students realized that they hadn’t been consulted. “Yeah, no one asked me,” one student said. “Raise your hand in math class,” I suggested, “and ask ‘Why… Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: Next Year’s Teacher
I’m volunteering a couple mornings a week in an AP Computer Science Principles class for the upcoming school year . . . Schools are adding more CS classes and, almost without exception, retraining in-service teachers to teach them, rather than hiring people with knowledge and experience in the field. I met with the teacher today to do some upfront planning. At one point, he was calculating how many printouts we’d need for 6 groups of 4 students each . . . “Let’s see,” he said, “6 times 4 is 20 . . .” If you think that’s funny, guess what class he normally teaches: accounting. “Are you going to write that?” someone asks me. “Does he know you have a website?” “I don’t know what he knows or doesn’t know. Except he doesn’t know what 6 times 4 is.” Read more →
How to Not Get a Job Teaching Computer Science
She was a software engineer interviewing for a job teaching high school computer science. One of the interviewers read a question: XYZ School District is committed to effective learning for all students. Key in this work is improving the success of historically underrepresented, low-income and/or students of color. What are your experiences implementing instructional strategies shown to be most effective in increasing the success of these populations? She knew what the “right” answer looked like but after a momentary hesitation decided to answer honestly. “I think it’s probably counterproductive to single out groups of students as needing special handling to be up to the standards of the other students.” “We’re not saying that they’re not up to the standards of the other students,” the interviewer said. “Okay, let me say it another way. We have four labels available: ‘historically underrepresented,’ ‘low-income,’ ‘students of color’ and ‘none of the above.’ “From… Read more →
11,000 New Computer Science Teachers Considered Harmful?
Here’s the start of an email I got from Code.org: We’re kicking off our summer workshops to prepare 11,000 new CS teachers. Last month we welcomed over 600 teachers, facilitators, and Regional Partners to Atlanta, GA for our largest TeacherCon ever. On top of TeacherCon, we also have 350 K-5 workshops and 167 workshops for middle and high school teachers planned this summer, where we expect an additional 10,000 teachers who plan to begin teaching computer science for the first time this fall! This is heralded with an exclamation point, like it’s exciting news, but as a computer science person, I can’t get excited about it. Why do we want kids to be taught computer science by 11,000 teachers who know little or nothing about computer science? How can someone teach something that they themselves don’t do? See if you can get excited about any of the following possibilities: 11,000… Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: How to Get Top-Notch Teachers in the Classroom
I read something every day where educators and/or elected officials are talking about the importance for our kids, our country, our future, etc., of teaching computer science, the sticking point being an extreme shortage of qualified teachers. A person entering the workforce with a computer science degree is unlikely to go into teaching because of the opportunity cost: they can earn a lot more money as a software engineer. The likelihood of getting a mid-career tech industry professional to switch into teaching is even lower. Teacher salaries are based in large part on years of service. A mid-career person switching into teaching is not going to get a mid-career teacher’s salary, they are going to get a first-year teacher’s salary. So here’s the idea: Give CS professionals the opportunity to apply their years in industry to years of service as a teacher. It’s still a pay cut going from software… Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: The Phones Aren’t Helping You
I’m volunteering a couple mornings a week at a local high school, helping out with computer science classes. The way the classes are taught, via an online curriculum, provides a great temptation to kids to get off-task, which they do, usually by entertaining themselves with their phones. They get off-task in other ways too — web surfing, doing homework for other classes — but the main distractor is the phones . . . “As I mentioned before, I worked with another CS class a couple years ago. No phones allowed in the classroom. “I remember one day the assistant principal was in class observing . . . a student had a phone out, looking at it . . . he was holding it under the table so no one could see it, but this guy, the assistant principal, he did see it. “Oh man, did he hit the roof!… Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: When You Need Help, Ask For Help
I’m volunteering a couple mornings a week at a local high school, helping out with computer science classes. It’s a mixed class . . . most of the students are taking AP Computer Science Principles, and about 10 kids just recently started a second-semester Visual Basic class. The VB kids were pretty inquisitive at first but started to get discouraged . . . in my opinion because of the way the material is presented to them via an online curriculum. The current approach to teaching computer science in American schools, because of the shortage of (I almost said “lack of”) qualified teachers is to use packaged courses delivered to students online. My observation is students assume that because they’ve been put in front of a computer full of lessons, they’re expected to be able to read and understand the material and complete the assignments on their own with no help.… Read more →