High School CS Teacher’s Experience like University CS Teacher’s: “Code Shock”

Jeff Yearout has been teaching for over 25 years, and is just in his second year of teaching CS.  His concerns in his blog echo many of the same ones that I hear from higher-education CS teachers, e.g., dealing with the wide variance of students, and getting all students to engage around code (pseudo or otherwise).

I think one of the hardest things to manage in designing a curriculum is how to dial the difficulty up at a proper pace for the “center mass” of the class skill level. And in this new curriculum from PLTW this particular unit starts out manageable, but suddenly shoots up rapidly, thus the “code shock” mentioned above. I also have the challenge of having a lot of kids in class who simply don’t want to interact in class when, for instance, I’m working through pseudocode on the board.

From “Teaching CS is Hard“