I had my pre-observation meeting with my principal this past Friday. Right now it is Sunday and I am writing this on a mattress on the floor of my friend’s place in Austin. Weather is cloudy, cool (low 60s), and not humid. Wondering if weather affects what/how I write which is why I am including it here.

I had a lot of thoughts on my mind walking into this meeting. The monday was a teacher in-service day and I spent two hours 1:30-3:30pm in a meeting with some administration people discussing my flyer, the EPG, and whether we would allow students who have demonstrated prior mastery to a computer science course. The decision was made to not allow students to skip. One recommendation would be to scaffold heavily for students in the intro classes who already have programming background - basically either 1) give them access to the next course or 2) introduce a lot of other possible projects for them to do to further their mastery of the current content. I am leaning more towards the latter - I think we are sort of doing this already with the Raspberry Pi’s and allowing students to make as much of a light show as they want - for my PreAP class.

Anyways, some of the things I have written down that I wanted to discuss were:

  • Room next year?
  • Goals
  • Data - demographics (ethnicity, gender)
  • Overhaul of CS research (other schools/districts) - to plan course sequencing/topics taught

My principal has this thing where he asks if I have any questions I wanted to ask. Here are some things I wrote that I would like to talk about (so I didn’t forget it):

  • Discussing Data! Easy to get girls. How do you get underrepresented/economically-disadvantaged minorities in? Other teacher push back.
  • Tired. As teacher dealing w/ admin/bureaucracy/inertia hard. As principal (and as who you are), what is hard(est) for you?
  • Other teacher saying it’s ‘better’ out there. I’ve only ever taugth here & studied here (besides student teaching). How does Springs compare with others?

I won’t get into full detail of everything we talked about, but we had a great conversation and I felt like I discussed nearly everything on my list. He has also only taught within the CCISD system, although he has observered other school districts, so I didn’t get much there. I shared how I felt tired and how being proactive was so much harder than just letting what typically happens to happen; my principal encouraged me by sharing being proactive allows you to see needs and make changes and not have to ‘respond’ to things - you can pre-empt even. Discussed diversity both gender and ethnic wise; I was able to share about how having 3 sisters helped me see the biases nudging them away from CS classes; elementary clubs where we have 50% female/male ratio, but still almost 100% white/asian; staff/admin being representative of student body and the research behind that.

Good stuff. Left feeling appreciated and acknolwedged for what I am trying to do with the CS program at my school and district.