Silver Linings, I Guess

One of the saddest moments of my professional life was in August 2019, when I discovered that I had deleted (and therefore lost) eight years' worth of materials for my AP Computer Science A class. I had created so much content and gathered many resources after eight years.

The problem was that I knew it was out of control, and I was trying to get organized. I had zipped all of my current files in May to reorganize things into the new units just released by the College Board. I knew then I could copy things from the zip file as I used them, so they'd be better organized. (One problem I had was that I have 3+ copies of every file in at least three different locations, and I never knew which one was best.)

It had died about a third of the way through the zip process. Most likely, I had to move rooms between classes and had closed my computer, forgetting it was happening. Of course, I forgot to check that everything had made its way to the zip file. I did not realize this until August.

May through August of 2019 was a challenging time in my life. I had just gotten a new part-time job and suffered horribly from imposter syndrome. I was trying to learn the material to teach two brand-new courses. I was stressed, depressed, and nervous. On top of it all, I had erased all my materials to teach the class I had already been teaching for eight years.

Luckily, this was after the market had exploded with new curriculum materials for AP CSA, and I had my pick of sources so that I wouldn't have to do it alone. In the fall, I picked a curriculum I did not love. I wasn't thrilled with how they divided the materials, although they had some great activities. This drove me to look for alternatives in the spring. I had always heard of Runestone Academy, and I had often tried to use the AP Review book that had been published there by Barb Ericson.

I don't remember why, but I chose CSAwesome, the new "edition" of the CSA book by Beryl Hoffman and Barb Ericson, and I've never looked back.

That spring, the pandemic shut down the world, and I was able to do decent online learning because of CSAwesome. The following year, I taught a section of CSA in a fully online school and a section in a hybrid school. The students did fine, because of CSAwesome. Using CSAwesome fits my "self-paced, mastery" preference very well. Everything in it is well thought out and intentional; here was a living curriculum that applied everything I learned in my CS Pedagogy class at the College of St Scholastica.

This ended up being one of the best decisions of my life, as it led to new hobbies, new jobs, and new educational opportunities. More on that later.

Sadly, I cannot say that I have learned my lesson. My digital stuff is now mainly in Google Docs, but I still have many copies and rarely take the time to organize them as I should. However, I have several scripts that run daily to organize my files so they do not get as bad as they have in the past.