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Highlights of being a middle school Computer Science teacher!
Important caveat, I learned on the job and had no real training to be a middle school teacher aside from my degree in CS and having taught university level courses at Berkeley. It was a humbling experience and by far the most difficult job I’ve ever had!
2019-2020 - Becoming a teacher, COVID Hits, it’s a fun mess
I joined the classroom midway through the 19-20 school year just one month before COVID hit the U.S. Looking back, I should have seen the pandemic coming given the news coming from Asia; but I, like many others, was woefully naive. It’s funny to think about how I was planning out the rest of the school year while completely ignoring the rest of the world.
Come March, I was abruptly thrust into the role of helping our school transition to distance learning alongside our leadership team. Thankfully, I had plenty of experience with Zoom while working at TeachFX as an engineer. To kickstart our whirlwind of switching to online learning, I onboarded all our staff onto Zoom and gave Zoom workshops to our teachers. For the rest of the school year, I continued to hold tech office hours to support our teachers with distance learning tools.
Meanwhile, in my classroom, we fumbled a few times but made it through in the end. There was a week or two of adhoc lessons, one particularly fun lesson (at least for me) was on the topic of the history of the internet where we got to use some old terminal-based emulators to access the internet. I really enjoyed the Crash Course Computer Science series.
One lesson I learned was that advanced is a very relative word. I was told my students had 2-3 years of Python and Javascript under their belt. They were advanced and needed me to really challenge them. I reacted by writing curriculum to teach them recursion and light interpreters (parsing and calculators). Little did I know that “middle school advanced” is pretty much basic if-else statements, if even that. Anyway. That was a fun disaster. I learned a lot and I can only hope that the kids did too.
Tools I used:
- CodeHS, Tynker
- Snap filters
- PearDeck
- Kahoot
- Schoology
Curriculum / Lessons:
- History of the internet and computers
- Functional programming
- Parsing and calculators
2020 - Switch to Snap! and Hybrid Learning
Over the summer I fretted over putting together an appropriate Python and Javascript curriculum. I spent weeks pouring over the scattered bits of curriculum left by the previous teacher and mapping out a potential curriculum. Deep down I was plagued by feelings of inadequacy. I wanted to be as well liked as the previous teacher had been and was trying to figure out how she did it all. While sharing my woes with a confidante, I was asked if I believed in what I was doing. Huh, that was obvious! Not at all! First of all, I I wanted my students to have the experience I did when I was first learning CS under Dan Garcia in BJC. And I knew that I learned so much in that class without having to trip over parentheses and semi-colons. So I made a very last minute gametime decision to switch to a blocks-based language. Snap! of course was the obvious choice. At the same time, BJC was starting to form a middle school curriculum called BJC Sparks. I heavily leaned on that and BJC in the beginning, focusing on functional programming.