There are about 1800 students at Henry M. Gunn HS (Palo Alto, CA). Enrollment in CS has grown from 90 students three years ago to 110 to 130 last year to 190 this year. This has enabled me to be a full-time CS teacher (I remain in the Math department and am happy to be a member thereof) and to have a colleague teach a section of CS.
Growing the program has been a real team effort. My colleagues in the Math department have been outstanding in handing out literature and encouraging the students to enroll in CS classes. Teachers in some other classes have let me come in and talk about the advantages of learning computer science during high school. My engineering colleagues and I have sorted out pathways for kids who have a strong interest in the T and E parts of STEM (see http://paleyontology.com/engr). The administration has been incredibly supportive.
I have also been fortunate enough to teach in Google’s CAPE program the past two summers. If you are a high school teacher and you are serious about getting kids excited about CS and giving them opportunities to be creative, CAPE is fantastic. Yes, the stories about the food at Google are true, but they are relatively uninteresting compared to the intellectual capital of the people and the teaching resources that were provided. It was a lot of work, and it was incredibly fun. (Google is hiring for 2012; see http://www.google.com/edu/cape/ if you are interested.)
So, life has been terrific. It has also been exhausting. And that can be a problem if one has Crohn’s Disease, an affliction I have had for my whole life. Since last June, I have had a kidney stone, two Crohn’s Disease flares, and a bout of shingles that forced me to stay home for about five weeks. All of this is part of life and the show must go on.
During the five weeks I had shingles, the question for me was how to proceed, given that I could not go in to school to teach. There was no way that I was going to let the CS program decline; not after all the effort that it took to get it where it is.
What I am about to describe is not rocket science. It’s easy enough to do. It’s just a matter of doing it.
Making Lemonade
There is an old adage: “When life throws you a lemon, make lemonade.” If these health problems had happened to me 25 years ago, before the Web and Skype, the CS courses might have been in jeopardy and certainly would have been without a teacher. I have posted my courses on the Web since I got to Gunn, so students know where to find the things I expect them to do even if I am not present. It has been nice to leave the following lesson plan for substitutes: “The homework is online and the students know where to find it. Please make sure they do not take liberties by playing games, using Facebook, etc.” The Web is a game changer and it’s easy to edit content remotely in case I need to alter the pace of the course.
Despite missing over a month, I never needed to slow the pace of instruction. That is largely due to Skype. Many of my colleagues know about Skype as they have used it to do video calls to family. (If your in-laws are in Australia as mine are, it is sweet to avoid long-distance charges.) What people may not know is that, in addition to being able to show one’s face over the Internet, one can also choose to show what is appearing on the monitor. So, I Skyped into the classroom to deliver lectures, with actual code being presented live to the students.
To arrange this, the technical requirements were:

The IT team at Gunn was superhuman and incredibly understanding and accommodating and made sure all of the above were working. They helped the subs set up the teacher computer and log on to Skype, which might have been the biggest problem as having an IT person in the classroom meant being away from something else that was important. Note to everyone: be nice to the IT people. Good IT people (and we have some great IT people at my school) can be lifesavers.
We had everything but the video camera in place (we did get a camera for one session, but it only captured about half of the students), so the substitutes were asked to help call on students who had questions. I lectured approximately once per week per class, which is what I do normally (more on that another time). Students worked in groups and helped each other out, but some also sent me email during class if they had questions. I could not properly monitor what students were doing, but the stories I received from subs and administrators suggest that they were generally on task.
This seems to be confirmed by the results. The students were able to keep up and perform at the same level as students in previous years. There may be exceptions to this, but they are not apparent to me. I am still trying to sort out what that means. (If the lectures were good for the students, they were therapeutic for me. We humans are social creatures and the boredom level was just awful.)
The feedback that I received for using Skype was wonderful. Various administrators were complimentary and occasionally brought in people to watch parts of my lectures. Students sent me emails, saying that it really helped. I got an email or two from parents who had shingles and were thrilled that I was doing lectures despite the illness. And one of the subs left me a poem and an autographed Tim Lincecum poster. (I am not making this up. It’s really neat.)
Josh Paley
CSTA Leadership Cohort