tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4686898960754583402024-03-13T22:16:35.177-07:00C'est la ZMusing about education, computer science and maybe a few other miscellaneous topics.Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.comBlogger40125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-65655772582965666062012-11-01T05:01:00.003-07:002012-11-01T05:01:23.879-07:00Moving to GitHubJust a quick announcement here.<br />
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Moving the blog to a new location: <a href="http://cestlaz.github.com/">http://cestlaz.github.com</a>. I'll post some time on the reasons for the move, but for now, a post on how Stuy CS students spend hurricane days:<br />
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<a href="http://cestlaz.github.com/2012/10/31/sandy-bridge.html">http://cestlaz.github.com/2012/10/31/sandy-bridge.html</a><br />
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Enjoy.<br />
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<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-70083074232077288952012-05-09T17:39:00.001-07:002012-05-09T17:39:25.790-07:00My Favorite Year TeacherSorry for the weak title and movie reference.<br />
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It's teacher appreciation week -- one of our lesser celebrated weeks. I'm waiting for the annual letter we get from the chancellor. Given the level of teacher bashing over the last few years, I've recently found their emails amusing.<br />
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I though I'd take the time to thank a few of my most influential teachers. To paraphrase: whatever good I've been able to do, it has been because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Alan Goff - 7th grade English - Wagner JHS</span></b><br />
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Great teacher, great storyteller. Every now and then class would be spent with Mr. Goff telling us a story of his childhood. From his school days when he discovered how to make explosive "goffolini" bombs and had to deal with the bully "GodDilla" to when he blew his hand off with said bombs to his time in the merchant marines. I think I learned more about bringing characters to life from listening to Mr. Goff than anywhere else. I'd like to think I'm somewhat entertaining in class and it started with Mr. Goff. Mr. Goff also shared with us the range of his interests. For me this led to a life of trying to learn something about everything. Thanks.<br />
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Mr. Goff passed away a number of years ago and I never had a chance to thank him. I still regret that. A few years ago, when Batya was graduating from Wagner. I drew the short straw and had to go to the awards ceremony. I love going to Batya and Natan's concerts and other things they do, but I hate these award ceremonies. When the vast majority of the students get awards, there really isn't anything special about them - I wasn't thrilled to go. It turned out that Batya won the Alan Goff Memorial Medal for writing. I didn't even know there was one. Brought a tear to my eye.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Herb Greenhut - 7th grade History - Wagner JHS</b></span><br />
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Wow, what can I say about Herb. He was the first teacher to challenge me to really think. Every year he would start the semester by impersonating a famous figure. Someone his students would never have heard of but their parents would have. For us I think it was William Jennings Bryan. Another year it was Thoreau. All his paperwork was under the pseudonym and he'd play us on for days. He'd engage us in debates as if we were adults.<br />
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Herb was a straight shooter. We were young but he never sugar coated things. Herb got us to question things like no teacher had before.<br />
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I could go on and on about Herb. He influenced generations. By the time I was in his class in the seventies, he was a veteran and he continued on until right before his death a couple of years ago.<br />
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Both my son and daughter had the privilege of being in Herb's class during his final years. He had retired from the school system but still taught at our synagogue. I asked them both about Herb. Their response "he makes us think." Thanks<br />
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As I said, I could go on and on about Herb but I found this piece <a href="http://newworld1.blogspot.com/2010/12/herbert-greenhut-rip.html">here</a> that does a better job than I'd be able to.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Richie Rothenberg - 12th grade AP CS - Stuy</span></b><br />
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The only way you could describe Richie would be a mensch in the truest sense of the word.<br />
<br />Richie was my teacher at Stuyvesant. He was a great teacher, but I got more from him as a colleague years later. Richie was always on the side of right and always did the right thing. Never a self promoter and never the "hip" teacher, he just went about his business of being a great teacher. If there was something he could do to help a student, he did it. Many times, the student never knew.<br />
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Richie passed away at 50 in 1997. The day it happened, school basically shut down. Normally a small memorial plaque is placed up near a room in memory of a teacher. This wouldn't do for Richie. Students, teachers, and alums contributed money and Madeleine Segall-Marx, artist and Stuy parent, contributed a year of her life creating <u>Celebration</u>:<br />
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<img alt="File:Danny-Jaye---Rothenberg-mem.jpg" height="240" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/94/Danny-Jaye---Rothenberg-mem.jpg/800px-Danny-Jaye---Rothenberg-mem.jpg" width="320" /><br />
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It can be found at Stuy on the fourth floor. Fifty boxes (7x7 + 1 double box). Each representing some aspect of Richie's life. I still spend time gazing at it.<br />
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These three have left us. I never had the opportunity to tell Mr. Goff how influential he was and that's something I regret. Herb became a friend, Richie, a friend and colleague and I'm grateful that I was able to express my gratitude numerous times.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Robert Dewar -- Systems I and II - Courant</b></span><br />
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Robert is the one college professor on my list and I will reach out to him very shortly just to share with him the impact he's had on me. I was in Robert's class during my sophomore year. If I remember correctly, we finished the syllabus in the first couple of weeks and the rest of the class became "what neat stuff will Professor Dewar teach us today." There was nothing pedagogically "right" about our class. Just 12 or so people around a table talking but it worked. I think I learned more about CS in those classes than most of my others combined. I think a lot came from the transmitted passion for learning neat things about a range of topics.<br />
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It's hard to capture what made each of these teachers special. That's the problem with the whole teacher evaluation movement. Richie was the closest to being a traditional teacher but they all had different styles and different personalities. They all helped shape me into the teacher and person I am today, so again to each of them, I say thanks.<br />
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<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-35596520799941120542012-04-24T17:50:00.000-07:002012-04-24T18:10:31.554-07:00Continuing the Journey<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Shortly after our event at Foursquare, I was chatting with Kevin Friedman (Stuy '96). Kevin's startup is <a href="http://www.cojourneo.com/">Cojourneo</a> and since it has an educational bent, he thought I might be interested in hearing about it.<br />
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I certainly was.<br />
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Rather than visiting Kevin, I thought it would be fun to have him come down after school, present Cojourneo to any students that wanted to stay late and then field questions.<br />
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Cojourneo is an interesting product. There's been a lot of hype around on line education in the past year, but it seems to me that Cojourneo's a little different. We've got efforts like Coursera and Udacity that are trying to bring university style offerings to the masses while places like Codecademy seem to be more vocational in nature. All three efforts are "class" based. That is, you are taking a class over a period of time. Despite some resources to make these classes shared experiences -- specifically things like discussion groups, they mostly seem to have students watching videos or working through on line material on their own. </div>
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Cojourneo's approach is to organize around "journeys" which aren't necessarily academic in nature, one of the journeys they have going now is <a href="http://u125899.sendgrid.org/wf/click?upn=RFLYp28x4tn3zctFtSv9u26CpQORa-2F0ctjP5N2rt-2BPjEwScoB8-2FDiOTIH3A2decWJOBzbvP-2BL04E-2BTSUUzAnnrfeBTKDP98OMWzCupR8df4-3D_0yQd2FpqhdDJMpTKTRf0-2Bgkt9TsX0gLH-2FMd1xsBq45m-2BDWXDwm9y5rOApSyT2yeJcwKLUGkENJdoY9rRSsOVmrBLVPyJXYbty3GU3x6bt2xa-2Bn7F4b-2Brh2n-2Flt7pIOH-2Bzk3N2i42qHszSVEJ5ojVeg-3D-3D">Surviving the Startup Journey</a>, but Kevin mentioned that they could have things like book clubs, travel journeys or any number of other types of journeys. They're also different in that they're really trying to create a shared experience -- you take the journey with a small circle of people, not solo - I love this aspect.</div>
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By no means am I an expert, but I like a lot of their ideas.</div>
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A bunch of students gathered and we were off. I had no idea how the talk would go but I figured that the kids hadn't had an opportunity to speak one on one with someone in the early stages of a startup so it would probably be valuable. </div>
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Kevin presented the product, talked about some difficulties and decisions along the way and generally tried to give the kids the flavor of what it was like to start a product and a company. The kids tried to reciprocate by providing feedback on the product. </div>
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Most of the questions focused on the business side rather than the technical. Kevin was asked about funding, monetization, building a user base, scaling, and any number of other ideas. </div>
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All in all, I think it was a valuable experience and look forward to bringing more alums down to talk to the current crop.</div>Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-4484882229168991932012-04-15T17:41:00.000-07:002012-04-16T02:08:00.726-07:00Anyone can cook<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Anyone can cook</span> - Chef Gusteau</div>
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These days the rage seems anyone can code.<br />
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On line attempts to teach coding and computing abound.<br />
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We've got Udacity and Coursera trying to bring college level academic offerings to the masses on one extreme and more down to earth "learn to code" efforts with Codecademy getting the most press.<br />
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While I applaud any effort to make knowledge more accessible, there are a lot of unanswered questions as to the effectiveness of these latest attempts. Recent posts by <a href="http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=13213">Dan Meyer</a> and <a href="http://hackeducation.com/2012/04/14/udacity-cs101/">Audrey Watters</a> have started to raise questions and in my opinion some of the hype has worn off.<br />
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At some point, I plan to talk at length about the Udacity and Coursera offerings as well as attempts to increase on line course offerings at the high school levels. I'll talk about the difficulties and dangers that lie ahead.<br />
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Today, I'd like to talk about the more vocational offerings such as what Codecademy is doing.<br />
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The premise seems to be that anyone can code and that everyone should code. I've been thinking about this for a while and I keep coming back to the question, "what's the endgame?"<br />
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Teaching Javascript, HTML and the like narrowly focuses on creating web pages. Even if we forget about difficulties of on line learning that include lack of an interactive feedback loop, lack of follow up, a narrow curriculum, and the fact that programming beyond the basics is not easy, what's the goal? While I find making an interactive web site cool, I don't know how much it benefits the masses.<br />
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One could argue that the mental exercise of programming is a benefit and having a better understanding of how a computer works is a good thing. I'd agree, but what we really could benefit from is a different paradigm in terms of how we approach using computers. A new approach would make even rudimentary scripting skills of greater value to all.<br />
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Most of us use computers as program loaders. That is, we sit down, load our word processor, edit something, and exit the word processor. Load our web browser, search the web, exit, load the next program, do something, etc. We might have multiple programs up at the same time, but we use them in isolation.<br />
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This is how most people's computing experience has evolved.<br />
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With this mindset, I'm not sure how useful coding will be for the masses. People might benefit from some rudimentary scripting a la Excel macros or Google App Scripts, but power users already do this. I don't think that the ability to program within the constraints of scripting individual applications will be a game changer. To make rudimentary programming skills valuable we must use computers in a way that allows us to use simple techniques to tie together powerful applications.<br />
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A few years ago, right before our Christmas break, I stopped over in the Math Chairman's office to wish him a good holiday. Danny was hard at work. He was frantically trying to change the math web site before he left.<br />
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The math site was a mess. It consisted of a few dozen loosely arranged folders each with multiple sub folders. Danny was looking in each folder for old sample final exams, each saved as a Tiff file. He would load the file into Photoshop, convert it to another format and save it. He would then change the corresponding HTML file to reference the new file. He had been at it for hours with no end in sight. I said "Danny, I've got this, go home."<br />
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I went to my office, wrote a small shell script, maybe 10 lines, hit enter, got on my bike and rode home. When I got there, the job was done.<br />
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Now Danny's a really smart guy and he's technically savvy. The difference is that I was taught to try to tie programs together through the command line while he was taught to do things in the Windows/Mac way of loading one program and using it in isolation. I used a simple shell script to tie together a number of powerful Linux applications (find, imagemagick, sed) rather than pointing and clicking over and over again.<br />
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I've seen this "program loader" mind set time and time again and in surprising places. My good friend and colleague <a href="http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/">Gary Rubenstein</a> has done a lot of work debunking the "educational reformers" that are currently in power. Gary had been using Excel to do all his analysis until I pointed out that he could download his data and use simple Python scripts to greater effect. Why was I surprised that Gary wasn't already doing this? Well, in addition to being an amazing math teacher, Gary holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and had worked as a professional programmer in a prior life.<br />
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Of course, our life isn't made any easier with closed file formats and vendors that try to isolate their data, but if we could re-educate people to use computers across applications, that would make rudimentary programming useful to all and then indeed there would be a reason for everyone to code.<br />
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<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-60204890509634014622012-03-31T10:48:00.003-07:002012-03-31T10:48:20.655-07:00Checking in with the family<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">"... the standardized courses don't shed much light on future opportunities and they make it hard for students to identify what they're most interested in. The CS department, on the other hand, is great at demonstrating all the things that are going on in the modern comp sci world." </span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">-- Asa, one of our current CS students.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">Asa's comment was in response to an event we held last Tuesday. We brought 100 current students up to <a href="http://foursquare.com/">FourSquare</a> along with 100 of our CS alums for a mixer. Other than the fact that we aren't a department, I'm hoping he was spot on. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg39oYY-BvHrpkphVJco5fkcPYux1WmQUGJIvQeF6eO3PBbAOUU7Cmn4KBLaTv0K8R2dLZH0yxpmsLpC5cNHcu4Ph9IVswdSy67NNngUMQ1OcYCF0mdXJAsqmFcrhfLmbaDiOpzC5R5CM/s1600/P1010793.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg39oYY-BvHrpkphVJco5fkcPYux1WmQUGJIvQeF6eO3PBbAOUU7Cmn4KBLaTv0K8R2dLZH0yxpmsLpC5cNHcu4Ph9IVswdSy67NNngUMQ1OcYCF0mdXJAsqmFcrhfLmbaDiOpzC5R5CM/s320/P1010793.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stuy CS from 1976 to the present</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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A couple of months ago, I started to try to organize the graduates I've had the privilege of teaching over the years. I put out some feelers and the response has been great. So far we have about 400 members. I like to refer to us as the Stuy CS family since I'd like to think there's a stronger bond than that typical between a teacher and his students. I'd also like to think there's a common thread across the years that ties the older and younger graduates together.<br />
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To kick things off, I thought it would be a great idea to get the alums together with the current students. We've got people all over the tech map, from giant companies to startups. I started putting a list together <a href="http://family.stuycs.org/pbs">here</a>. I thought it would be great to expose our current students to the range of possibilities that await them.<br />
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Immediately, the family came through. <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/noah_weiss">Noah</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/whizziwig">Dave</a> volunteered FourSquare as host for the event. They provided the food and the site. The alternative would have been to have the event at Stuy. This would have cost us and would have been somewhat mundane. Just being at a place like FourSquare seemed to really excite the current crop of Stuy students.<br />
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The evening of the event, I was a little nervous -- about 100 alums signed up, but would they show. I've been told that general alumni events can typically have a very high no-show rate, particularly when the event has no cost and registering is as easy as an email.<br />
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The kids and I arrived early -- school lets out at 3:30 and the event didn't start until 6:00. As 6:00 approached, the alums started to dribble in. By the time we started, we had a packed house!!! It was great seeing everybody again.<br />
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We had alums from every year. From 1995, my first set of graduates, to last years senior class. We also had a few older alums, including me and my classmate and friend Steve from '84 and Gerry ('76) , who I met when he volunteered to help Stuy CS back in the 90's. He's become a good friend to both me and the program in the years since.<br />
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For my part, I was extremely touched that everyone showed. As a teacher, you'd like to think you've had enough of an impact that your students would give back, but we rarely get any evidence as to the effects we've had. I've been fortunate enough to be in contact with a number of my alums through the years and a number of them have been kind enough express gratitude (often times more than I deserve) but to see everyone show up en masse really meant a lot to me. The only down side was there was so much going on, I really didn't get to spend time with anyone -- it was like hosting a wedding or bar mitzvah -- everyone's there, but you don't get to see anyone. I hope we can remedy this with more events and smaller events in the future.<br />
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If any of the "family" is reading this, you've also got to give me some props -- even though I haven't seen many of the alums in years, I recognized almost everyone and remembered far more names than I probably deserved to.<br />
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We spent the evening mixing students and alums and the FourSquare crew threw in tours of the facilities. Afterwards, many of the alums stayed back to discuss how to move Stuy CS forward. How the alumni community can help Stuy CS and it's current students and how it can become a resource for fellow alums. I think there are a lot of things we can do as a community, and I'm excited about what's to come in the near future for us as a group.<br />
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For the students, feedback has been terrific. I've gotten comments like:<br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">I was wavering between whether or not I would continue CS in college and as a career, but now I'm fairly certain.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">I really enjoyed the compsci </span><span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">event</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">, it was very helpful to talk to alumni because they reminded me that there is life after college. I also liked the community within a community feel of the </span><span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">event</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The students pretty much universally loved the event and I really think they got a lot out of it. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We had parent conferences last Thursday and Friday and parent after parent confirmed this. Just about every visitor I had mentioned how much their son or daughter got out of meeting the "family". People who were in their shoes a few short years ago and are now doing great things in the tech community. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">From what I can tell, this was a unique event, at least to Stuy, no one's ever done anything like this before in any subject area. It looks like it was a slam dunk, at least with respect to value to the students. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">Now the "family" just has to decide where we can go from here.</span><br />
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<br /></div>Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-48377217094553207792012-03-03T08:53:00.001-08:002012-03-03T08:53:49.801-08:00Field Trip!!!!!!!!<br />
When kids are knee deep in nlog(n) algorithms and working on recursion, it's easy to lose track of the amazingly neat things that are right around the corner for them.<br />
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I've recently been working on organizing our Stuyvesant Computer Science alumni network and am putting together a page with some of the places our graduates work <a href="http://family.stuycs.org/pbs">here</a>.<br />
<br />
It can be hard to see how one goes from sorting and searching in Java to working at places like Google, or FourSqurare or creating your own startup like <a href="http://www.digitalocean.com/">DigitalOcean</a>, <a href="http://usablehealth.com/">Usable Health</a>, <a href="http://www.timehop.com/">TimeHop</a>, or <a href="http://prophop.com/">PropHop</a>.<br />
<br />
We try to show how close they are to doing really cool things, like the other day when we developed some solutions that lead to <a href="http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/SCWeb/imret/index.html">seam carving</a>, but there's still a large enough gap between what they are learning and where they will be that it's hard for them to see how close they are.<br />
<br />
With this in mind, yesterday, we took a field trip.<br />
<br />
Being an NYU Alum myself (BA '89, MS '95?), the CS people at Courant and I have periodically tried to form a partnership but there were internal problems at NYU that prevented us. Over the past few years, however, things have changed and we're well on our way.<br />
<br />
Thanks to the efforts of the always amazing <a href="http://cs.nyu.edu/~korth/">Evan Korth</a>, Michael Overton, Rosemary D'Amico, Romeo Kumar, Shawn Abbot, and others, we were able to bring about 100 Stuyvesant juniors to NYU for a day of computer science.<br />
<br />
We had four amazing presenters.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://blog.kenperlin.com/">Ken Perlin</a> batted leadoff talking to the kids about a variety of his interests. Basically a smorgasbord of places one can go to with CS. Ken touched on things ranging from expressing emotions from an animated avatar composed of five polygons to paradigm shifts relating to ebooks.<br />
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<a href="http://cs.nyu.edu/~fergus/pmwiki/pmwiki.php">Rob Fergus</a> then gave a talk on image deblurring. Where Ken's talk provided a range of topics, Rob focussed in on one. The kids were really able to see how what they're doing now is just one step from solving some really neat problems.<br />
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<a href="http://www.news.cs.nyu.edu/~jinyang/">JinYang Li</a> was next. Her talk focused on systems touching on infrastructure issues and parallel processing. This provided an overview of one specific field in computer science.<br />
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Batting cleanup was Nathan Hull. Nathan talked about IOS developement. The most hands on topic of the day. Nathan really emphasized the fact that the kids could just download the tools to do either IOS or Android development and with online resources, they could teach it to themselves.<br />
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All this was followed by a great lunch.<br />
<br />
It was a great range of talks and the kids left having a much better idea of what CS will be like in college and the range of things they'll be able to do.<br />
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Right now, I'm working on another event which will bring our students together with Stuy graduates working in the industry to give our kids more exposure to the step after college but more on that in a few weeks.<br />
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<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-88988701132338625292012-03-01T15:56:00.001-08:002012-03-01T15:56:44.468-08:00Pair Programming Tag Team ShootoutSo today we changed things up a bit.<br />
<br />
Instead of having a typical lab type periods, we tried the Pair Programming Tag Team Shootout.<br />
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We aren't annualized so while the kids that have been with me since September have been working in pairs for a while, the other half of the class is just getting used to how we do it. I also wanted to get the kids to mix a little more.<br />
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Hence the shootout.<br />
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Everyone got a sheet with a bunch of problems on it:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/83400730/Shootout" style="-x-system-font: none; display: block; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 12px auto 6px auto; text-decoration: underline;" title="View Shootout on Scribd">Shootout</a><iframe class="scribd_iframe_embed" data-aspect-ratio="0.772727272727273" data-auto-height="true" frameborder="0" height="600" id="doc_39108" scrolling="no" src="http://www.scribd.com/embeds/83400730/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-2kfbc4856l652aq1j5ik" width="100%"></iframe><br />
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I then paired them off randomly.<br />
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The idea is complete the first problem, find a new partner, repeat.<br />
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By the end of the period each student worked with between five and seven partners.<br />
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I'm having them send me their solutions and partners tonight.<br />
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The early response was good -- it's speeding up them getting to know each other and it was a nice change of pace. We had some problems coordinating switching problems, but we'll do better next time.<br />
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All in all a good day.<br />
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<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-9842564002260141202012-02-08T16:32:00.000-08:002012-02-08T16:32:54.608-08:00Let me Google that for youPiloting a new course this semester - Intro to Computer Science part 2. Between the existing Intro part 1 and this, we should be able to do a pretty thorough job in preparing our kids for the future.<br />
<br />
We decided that we wanted the kids to make deliverables in the form of web pages - plain old html written by hand. Part of the idea was to demystify things, part was to let the kids show off their work, part was to have something that they can generate programatically as the course progressed, and part was to give them a tool they might find valuable beyond their computer science classes.<br />
<br />
We also wanted to help teach the kids how to find information and how to learn things on their own. Despite the fact that our students use computers all the time, they possess a widely varying skill set. With that in mind, here's what we tried to do:<br />
<br />
After a brief introduction to what a web page is (just a text file with markup) and showing them the bare<br />
minimum of markup:<br />
<br />
<br />
<script src="https://gist.github.com/1775745.js?file=simple.html">
</script><br />
<br />
I recommended a simple editor - gedit - while resisting all my inner urges for all things emacs, and then showed them an image of a web page:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.stuycs.org/courses/ml2/zamansky/work/hw-1/SampleHTMLWebPagePicture.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="177" src="http://www.stuycs.org/courses/ml2/zamansky/work/hw-1/SampleHTMLWebPagePicture.gif" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
The end goal was to make a page that had all of the elements in the above image but I also asked:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>How did they go about finding out how to make the page?</li>
<li>Where did they search?</li>
<li>what turned up bad results (and what were they)?</li>
<li>what turned up good results (and what were they)?</li>
</ul>
<div>
I was very pleased with the results. Just about all the kids are now able to make a web page with the components in the image above. More importantly, this is what came out of our discussion:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Everyone used Google exclusively as a search engine.</li>
<li>The range of queries ranged from things like "html tutorial," "making a web page," and just plain "html" to maybe not so good things like "gedit web page."</li>
<li>No one used social search or used facebook.</li>
<li>They mostly all found sites such as w3schools. </li>
</ul>
<div>
I'm hoping this is a good first step in having the students find things on their own and not be afraid to try things. I think it's an encouraging start.</div>
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<br /></div>Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-74658602930984127362012-01-29T17:06:00.000-08:002012-01-29T17:06:16.953-08:00CS StressI've been mostly underwater for the last couple of weeks.<br />
<br />
End of term issues combined with the Academy of Software Engineering announcement has pretty much eaten up all of my out of class time.<br />
<br />
It's going to be a week or so before I can finish writing the posts I was planning on, but it looks like a storm is brewing around Stuyvesant and Computer Science so I thought I'd put up this short semi-related post.<br />
<br />
Stuyvesant has a reputation of being something of a pressure cooker. The day can be as long as ten periods and it's not uncommon for a student to take three or more AP classes, even before the senior year. The question of student workload and stress has been a hot topic for a number of years.<br />
<br />
There's frequently tension over how many courses and which courses a student should be allowed to take. Usually, this revolves around the school placing a limit on the number of classes, or more specifically, the number of A.P. classes a student can take. Most recently, the conversation looks to be turning to the number of classes a student can take overall.<br />
<br />
Given that most A.P. classes fall within a Stuyvesant student's required sequence of classes - that is, Calculus is just "the next math class" and A.P. U.S. History is slotted in place of a students regular U.S. History course, limiting the number of classes a student can take, A.P. or otherwise could have a major impact on Computer Science at Stuyvesant.<br />
<br />
What's most disturbing is that limiting student options in terms of courses may not do anything to decrease stress and workload. No one has looked at what is actually going on in student's required classes.<br />
<br />
I decided to collect some information from our students. I sent out a survey to five of our seven A.P. C.S. classes (three of mine, two of JonAlf's -- the other two classes don't have a mailing list). I asked them to rate the work load and stress factor for A.P. CS, their typical Stuy course and their typical Stuy A.P.course. So far, I've gotten 80 responses (out of about 150 students emailed). Here's what we got (ratings were on a 1-10 scale):<br />
<br />
<br />
<table><tbody>
<tr><th></th><th>A.P. C.S.</th><th>Reg. Class</th><th>A.P. Class</th></tr>
<tr><td>Workload avgs </td><td>4.97 </td> <td>6.65 </td> <td>7.13 </td> </tr>
<tr><td>Workload dev </td><td>1.94 </td> <td>1.41 </td> <td>1.52 </td> </tr>
<tr><td>Stress avgs </td><td>4.67 </td> <td>6.39 </td> <td>6.94 </td> </tr>
<tr><td>Stress dev </td><td>2.24 </td> <td>1.63 </td> <td>1.64 </td> </tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />I know this isn't really hard data, but it seems that our A.P. C.S. classes are considered to be both easier and less stressful than other classes at Stuyvesant. Given that our kids do very well at C.S., we're probably doing something right and it will be a shame if student opportunities become limited. I'll certainly write more on this as the situation develops.<div>
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For you educators out there, is stress an issue at your schools and how do you deal with making room for students to take CS at your schools? </div>
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</div>Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-12131077043015098692012-01-15T05:32:00.000-08:002012-01-16T03:41:29.318-08:00My Favorite Student<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2q6KQZqBvLczunUcKC8doT8qsazWGuAw_wm5r2lsnISUg1Ph9Lkt-BaPEPHX2zRXGp2lar7_stQkL_U0IpHckwVYOufwQLBwQVxSqEdM6qLKM5VhHhJsM43XLxU-C-Rm9j3JeArzejl4/s1600/Screenshot+at+2012-01-15+13%253A48%253A37.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2q6KQZqBvLczunUcKC8doT8qsazWGuAw_wm5r2lsnISUg1Ph9Lkt-BaPEPHX2zRXGp2lar7_stQkL_U0IpHckwVYOufwQLBwQVxSqEdM6qLKM5VhHhJsM43XLxU-C-Rm9j3JeArzejl4/s320/Screenshot+at+2012-01-15+13%253A48%253A37.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fred Wilson and me at #SOTC2012</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Last week I was given the honor of attending the State of the City address. The mayor was announcing a new school for the fall. An Academy for Software Engineering. This has been in the works for a while and has a long way to go but the announcement was a major step. The project really got its start a couple of years ago. I'd been working hard for years prior trying to get the city to help me grow the program I developed at Stuyvesant, but until Fred got involved, there was no movement. Fred has to receive much of the credit for any good that we do as a result of this and I'd like to publicly thank him. If you don't follow Fred, you can read his post on the school <a href="http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/01/the-academy-for-software-engineering.html">here</a>.<br />
<div>
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<div>
It was pretty neat to be on stage for the announcement, but those of you who know me know that I'm not a self promoter and these types of events aren't "me."</div>
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<div>
What I found really special, were the emails and tweets I got from my former students over the next day or so. As a teacher, we'd like to think we are in some way a "force for good" in our student's lives and we rarely get to really see what impact we do or don't have. To hear from so many and such gracious comments brought tears to my eyes. Thanks guys.</div>
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I've been thinking a lot about my career as a teacher recently. I decided to leave industry over twenty years ago. As teachers, particularly teachers with technical backgrounds we leave a financially lucrative field to enter one with very few financial rewards. It's also a field very much under attack, particularly in recent years. The current line of thought seems to be that teachers are to blame for everything bad in education and government and private interests, everything good. As a senior teacher, I'm particularly worthless, at least according to what I've heard on the radio over the past year.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So, what do I get out of the deal?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Well, when I hear form my graduates, I know that I've made a difference. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Also, the friendships I've developed over the years.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img class="eq" height="400" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-d1KZ2LtyNbs/TuPud4EM8hI/AAAAAAAAGq0/9M__1ubQhWI/s400/IMG_20111210_184233.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="300" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stuy '84, '95, 2013, 2015 and families</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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A few weeks ago, we were catching up with a few of the Stuy '95 crew. We do it far too infrequently. They were students, they're now friends. I've had the privilege of seeing many young people grow to adulthood, get married, have children and in a small way I've been able to share in their lives. This is the upside of my career choice.<br />
<br />
Maybe this is a result of being a computer science teacher who tries to keep a foot in the tech world. Maybe something else.<br />
<br />
From the college student who stops by just to say hello to the graduate living across the country who drops a line to say how they're doing. That's the upside of the teaching profession.<br />
<br />
Recently I thought it would be a good idea to organize the Stuy CS family. Collect email addresse and get a network going. I posted on facebook and sent out a few emails two days ago. So far, 240+ signups.<br />
<br />
A while ago someone asked me who was my favorite student?<br />
<br />
They're the ones that I'm still in touch with many years after they graduate.<br />
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</div>Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-59821459985946221932012-01-11T10:10:00.000-08:002012-01-11T10:10:12.210-08:00Pretty sneaky, Sis<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=connect+4&hl=en&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=Y74NT7zGJoTX0QHxv8zsBQ&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CBUQ_AUoAQ&biw=1016&bih=623#"></a><br />
<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=connect+4&hl=en&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=Y74NT7zGJoTX0QHxv8zsBQ&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CBUQ_AUoAQ&biw=1016&bih=623#"></a><br />
<br />
I've always lamented the fact that we don't have the time or structure to really teach our kids to program.<br />
<br />
In their early classes, they learn syntax, algorithms, and some ways of storing data and while they will probably work on some larger projects as they study CS, kids seem to be mostly left on their own in terms of how to take a project from problem or idea to completion.<br />
<br />
This frequently leads to poorly designed projects that are harder for the kids to write, debug, and modify. They end up with huge functions/methods no overall plan or design and everything's pretty much a mess<br />
<br />
To try to address this, and having finished most of the A.P. curriculum and not wanting to diverge from the other teachers, I figured we'd develop a class project before I gave the class time for their final projects.<br />
<br />
I'm not a huge game person, but since they decompose well, we decided on writing connect 4 - a game that can be described as tic-tac-toe but with four in a row, on a larger board, and WITH GRAVITY!!!!!!<br />
<br />
Actually, the choice of project didn't matter that much so long as it was the right size -- this was more about how we develop a program than about the actual program itself.<br />
<br />
I started by giving my classes about ten or so minutes to talk among themselves to design the program -- no guidance was given. About seven minutes in, I asked them to reflect on whatever they were discussing - if they were discussing a data structure, why? If class design, why? What was so important about whatever they were discussing that made it their first order of business.<br />
<br />
After a while, we started to share thoughts as a group. Most suggestions revolved around details -- how to you check for a winner, how do you make a move. This made sense - we've spent much of the term dealing with writing code fragments to do things and not too much time thinking about overall design.<br />
<br />
This lead to a healthy discussion of looking at things from the top down as well as bottom up.<br />
<br />
By the end of the class, we had identified the key classes we'd need (Board, Player, UI, Game Driver) and had some idea as to how they would relate to each other. By the next morning, we added a data structure for the board.<br />
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Over the next few days we filled in the missing pieces. We moved up and down levels of abstraction being careful to discuss why we designed things the way we did and adapting pieces as needed.<br />
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By the end of the project we were able to accomplish the following:<br />
<ul>
<li>Students saw how to have classes refer to each other - that is, the Player class had an instance variable to hold the board, while the Game class had instances for Players as well as the Board). </li>
<li>We were able to use different user interfaces for the program -- starting with simple console input and then moving to a GUI -- all we had to do was extend the UI class.</li>
<li>Likewise, implementing a computer player (albeit a rather limited one) was trivial.</li>
<li>I also tried to show frequent testing and the idea of developing one concept at a time.</li>
<li>We discussed the idea that while design is important, there's a point where you can over design. Be aware of the scope of a project, what can generalize, and what shouldn't.</li>
<li>With a good design, it was also trivialize to change things like game rules, how to move, board size. etc.</li>
</ul>
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Based on preliminary feedback, I think the students have a much better ideas as to how to break down, design, and build up a project from design to implementation.<br />
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If any one's interested, the code is available <a href="http://code.google.com/p/ml1x-z-src/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Fsrc%2Fc4">here</a>.<br />
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We'll see if it helps with the final projects, but I'm optimistic. Spending time highlighting the design and development process while building a project can only help.<br />
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Anyone else have interesting mid-size projects they do with their classes?<br />
<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-59099214381082056702011-12-15T17:51:00.001-08:002011-12-17T18:07:10.753-08:00Stanford classes -- what I'd do next<br />
Now that the ML and AI courses are at an end, here are some of the things I would do moving forward.<br />
<br />
Both courses already have a basic track where students just watch the lectures and do the in lecture quizzes and an advanced track where students also complete weekly assignments. I think we can be certain that there were students who just watched a few lectures, many who completed every assignment, and those who fell at all points in between.<br />
<br />
On top of this, there were students who made use of the on line discussion groups and those who didn't.<br />
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This means there ware a wide range of experiences to be had.<br />
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With this in mind, here's what I would do.<br />
<br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Suggestions dealing with basic site content:</span></b><br />
<br />
<b>More practice problems, particularly in AI</b><br />
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While there were in video quizzes each week that provided practice, it would have been nice if there was a link to additional optional problems (preferably with solutions available). This would be easy to implement. The ML class would also benefit from this, but since you could retake the weekly assignments and get some variation on the questions, it would be as necessary.<br />
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<b>Better reference materials</b><br />
<br />
Reference sections would be nice as well. The AI staff posted related sections from the text, but there were a number of great on line resources I discovered by reading the discussion groups. Perhaps some of these could be linked to from the main site.<br />
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<b>Grading</b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
I'm pretty sure that having weekly assignments that were actually graded helped keep me honest. The fact that the ML course was submit as many times as you want and the AI course was one shot didn't matter. I put the same effort into both classes. In a way I preferred the ML course. I was frustrated a few times when I mis-entered something on a homework or forgot to convert units and got a lower grade than I thought I should have (I know, the grade doesn't really count).<br />
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I'd actually kind of like the AI course to move more towards the ML class model. The grades don't really count for anything anyway, and if they did, there are so many X-factors.<br />
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For example, if some one has to do the weekly assignment early due to obligations later in the week, he or she can't make use of clarifications. Likewise, students probably had widely varying amounts of time to dedicate towards the course. Contrast that to the traditional undergrad student probably has a similar workload to the other people in their classes. In the ML class, it all really didn't matter.<br />
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<b>Office Hours:</b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
I wasn't a huge fan of the office hour questions in the AI class but I very much liked the idea of seeing the profs directly answering weekly questions, it helped connect the instructors and the class. This was lacking in the ML class and should be added.<br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">On running the class in the future:</span></b><br />
<br />
What made these classes different from other on line lectures was that these were "live" with a staff releasing new content, opening and closing assignments, and adjusting as the course progressed. Each class also had a large number of people taking the class at the same time. Far different than say someone arbitrarily to watch videos from an Open Class Ware course.<br />
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I'd like to believe that the live staff, real deadlines, and large cohorts had a significant psychological effect. I've started on line courses in the past but rarely finished them. I think the weekly deadlines and "live" aspect of the course got me to start early each week and forced me to stay up to date.<br />
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With this in mind, Stanford could just run the courses again in a similar manner, possibly with some one else acting as "instructor" to field office hours and oversee the course.<br />
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In addition I'd allow people to take the courses in the following ways:<br />
<br />
<b>Solo:</b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
Since many people probably didn't avail themselves of the discussion groups, there's no reason not to allow someone to start at any time. All that would be needed is the ability to have them submit projects, quizes, etc. If the system could do that, Anyone could take the course at any time, albeit without interaction with others.<br />
<br />
<b>Cohort:</b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
People could sign up with a start date or number of students in mind. When that's reached, a cohort group can start the class. The discussion pages could be modified so that a cohort can go to it's own discussion page and the system can dole out lectures and assignments on a pre-determined schedule. This would allow the course to start at a range of times while making sure that students had a community of learners to support each other via discussion groups.<br />
<br />
<b>Facilitated:</b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
Similar to Cohort but someone would sign up as a facilitator. They would moderate the discussion group and control the flow of lectures and assignments. There could even be a way of "licensing" facilitators so they could run official versions of the classes. This way, a local group or school could run the class on their schedule.<br />
<b><br /></b><br />
So, there you have it. How I'd modify Stanford's great educational experiment. Next time, I'll share my thoughts on on-line education and how it's (mis) used in our high schools.<br />
<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-37982731839246648812011-12-08T17:36:00.001-08:002011-12-18T16:46:53.858-08:00ML and AI Courses - how they were taught<br />
This is the first in a three part series.<br />
<br />
Part 1 talks about my take on how the courses were presented.<br />
in Part 2, I'll discuss my take on how to improve the experience<br />
and finally, in part 3, we'll look at on line education with an emphasis on the high school market.<br />
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<table><tbody>
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<img alt="" class="rg_hi" data-height="249" data-width="202" height="200" id="rg_hi" src="https://encrypted-tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSz2UVcJKxi-GaRmx3YkMgXFsbHLv3GzzHScWL3s5-C_ZxFcspk" style="height: 249px; width: 202px;" width="162" /></div>
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<img alt="" class="rg_hi" data-height="215" data-width="234" height="215" id="rg_hi" src="https://encrypted-tbn3.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRgdP0dnwf27O3eF0sDEgxIswi2ahjhzwD-TOO1OoaKClry5krvPA" style="height: 215px; width: 234px;" width="234" /></div>
<br /></td> </tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
As some of you know, I've been taking the on line <a href="http://ml-class.com/">Machine Learning</a> and<a href="http://ai-class.com/"> Artificial Intelligence</a> courses offered by Stanford this semester. I took my AI class a hundred years ago and I never formally studied ML so I figured this would be a fun way to keep current.<br />
<br />
Lots of people have already "reviewed" the courses, compared the instructors, assignments, and what have you. Now that the courses are almost over, I thought I'd try to look at it a little differently, wearing my hat as a high school CS educator rather than just a consumer.<br />
<br />
I've enjoyed both courses tremendously and I'd like to thank everyone involved in making them available to the public.<br />
<br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Teaching style:</span></b><br />
<br />
<br />
Every teacher has their own style. Here's my take on our three instructors. I don't think any one style is universally better than any other, rather different styles speak to different students.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Peter Norvig: </span><br />
<br />
While watching Professor Norvig's videos, I felt that he was the learned sage imparting information. He's the wise man in the village that everyone turns to for answers.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Andrew Ng:</span><br />
<br />
I felt like I was with a tutor or a coach, everything was gently presented and at the end of the lecture I looked back and said "wow, I got all of that, it made sense." As he was the only lecturer for the ML class, I'll explain in more detail in the next section.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Sebastian Thrun:</span><br />
<br />
I can't come up with an analogy for Profressor Thrun, but I could feel him saying "let's try something neat, make some mistakes, explore neat things, and learn a whole bunch as a result." It took a while to get used to this, particularly when being asked questions before given enough information to approach them. Once used to the technique, however, I really enjoyed his approach to teaching.<br />
<br />
<b>Conclusions:</b> I would love to have the opportunity to sit in on live classes with all three as sitting in on a class can be very different from watching a video, but being on the east coast, I don't think that will happen any time soon.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b><br />
</b></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Lecture style:</span></div>
<br />
<br />
In the ML lectures, Prof. Ng gently guided the viewer through the topics. Generally first by describing the various parts of the topic in question and then by bringing it all together, completely describing the algorithm or technique.<br />
<br />
There are points in the lectures where Prof Ng states that the material is hard and that he had a tough time with some of it. This empathy and his assurances go a long way. I found the lectures easy to absorb and didn't generally have to think too hard. By itself this might have limited the educational experience, but combined with the assignments, it worked great.<br />
<br />
The AI class had a different approach. The class was frequently tasked with solving problems before material was presented. This turned me off early on. As the class progressed, the professors started to emphasize the fact that your quiz scores didn't matter (they appear on the web site but aren't calculated in the final grade, not that the final grade matters anyway) and that these questions were to get you thinking about the topic more deeply. Once I started looking at the approach from this point of view, I enjoyed the class much more.<br />
<br />
That said, I found the ML class lectures much more self contained and found myself looking for additional resources to learn the "base" material at times in the AI class.<br />
<br />
The AI lectures forced me to think more than the ML class which is probably a good thing since there were no programming projects to take up the slack.<br />
<br />
<b>Conclusions: </b>Styles differ but both can be effective. I could make as much or as little a mental effort as I wanted for the ML class and I'd get out of it what I put in. The AI required more effort to get anything out of it -- the approach forced you to think where the ML class encouraged you to think. In the end, I put comparable amounts of time into both and got about the same amount out of each.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Homework and Projects:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span><br />
Both classes had weekly homework assignments. Without these, I would probably have slacked off on the videos.<br />
<br />
In the AI class, these were submitted over the course of the week and then graded. Results and explanation videos were provided after grading was done. The process was fine but I found the interface occasionally frustrating. There were some complaints on the message boards about losing points due to mis-entry or insufficient accuracy of answers. I had a few problems with both but since I wasn't obsessed with getting a perfect score, it didn't bother me too much.<br />
<br />
I'm not sure how great the assignments were in terms of assessments but attempting them and then watching the video explanations turned out to be a strong pedagogical approach. I would recommend including the explanation videos in the regular sequence for the in lecture quizzes. I frequently gleaned a tidbit or two from them even when I answered the questions correctly.<br />
<br />
The only downside to the AI class quizzes and homeworks is that they were all in video form. A PDF of the midterm was published and something similar, at least for the weekly homework assignments would be a plus.<br />
<br />
The ML class also had weekly assignments. They were in the form of an interactive five question quiz. You could attempt them up to 100 times and your top score would count towards your grade.<br />
<br />
The real value added to these assignments was the explanations when you answered one wrong. There were even a couple of times I answered a question or two incorrectly on purpose to see the explanations provided. This style of assessment provided a feedback loop that could really help a student to be sure they understood the work.<br />
<br />
The one thing the AI class lacked that the ML class included was programming assignments. Probably a good thing for me since I don't think I would have had the time to be able to complete both courses with that added burden. That said, I loved the ML class programming assignments.<br />
<br />
For the most part, they were extremely well constructed, stepping the student through all of the weeks topics. By the end of each project, we had a working system and a good understanding of the weeks concepts. You could take shortcuts and finish the assignments by merely copying and coding up formulas but if you did it right, you'd learn a lot.<br />
<br />
The only assignment that I felt was less than stellar was the SVM project. Even then, it had redeeming features. For part of the project we had to process emails and build a table of word counts. Not directly related to SVMs but something that's frequently done with data to be processed and therefore still worthwhile.<br />
<br />
<b>Conclusions: </b>The programming projects really reinforced the lecture content in the ML class and I would imagine that adding them to the AI class would benefit students. Even without them, one could go to the actual Stanford class'es web site and work on their projects.<br />
<b><br />
</b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Other random thoughts:</b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
Both courses used the web site, email, and twitter to periodically communicate information, but the AI did one thing the ML class didn't. They periodically sent messages of congratulations and encouragement. They also repeatedly mentioned how well we were all doing in the lectures and in the office hours. Prof. Ng also provided encouraging words, but they seemed more self contained and generic.<br />
<b><br />
</b><br />
On the other hand, I wasn't happy with the large numbers of hints and deadline extensions that the AI class offered. I felt that it rewarded people who left things to for the last minute and gave them an advantage over students who were more diligent or had to complete the weeks work early and could not take advantage of the last minute hints and extensions. Ultimately it doesn't matter, but that's the type of thing that pushes my buttons.<br />
<br />
<b>Conclusions: </b>Again, both courses were great, but the AI course seemed to do a better job in connecting with the class, that is, making me feel like I'm part of the class rather than just watching.<br />
<br />
<br />
Wow, that was long. I hope some one finds this interesting. In the next installment, I'll talk about what I would do if I were moving these projects ahead.<br />
<br />
<br />
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<b><br /></b>Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-20413168838163884842011-12-03T09:49:00.001-08:002011-12-03T16:34:15.217-08:00Where's Waldo - Text style<br />
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<br />
Ok, it's a word search.<br />
<br />
We're always looking for interesting applications to build lessons around. Over the years, I've tried different things when teaching 2 dimensional arrays. Simple game boards, representing a crossword puzzle, tables of various sorts, etc.<br />
<br />
This year, <a href="http://www.jonalf.com/">JonAlf</a>, one of my amazingly talented colleagues, decided to go with building a word search. I decided to steal the idea. It's a great one.<br />
<br />
I thought I'd use this post to go through the project and why I like it.<br />
<br />
Ultimately, the students end up with a program that will generate an n by m word search filled with random words from a dictionary. We gave the kids a skeleton of the base class. The only actual code we had to supply was the method that loaded a dictionary file into memory. You can check out the assignment <a href="https://sites.google.com/a/stuycs.org/home/courses/ml1x/zamansky/work/hw-20-duetbd">here</a> and the finished code <a href="http://code.google.com/p/ml1x-z-src/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Fsrc%2FWordSearch">here</a> (we updated the repository as the project developed).<br />
<br />
<br />
The first part of the project are pretty mundane. The kids write a couple of constructors and toString. Basically just practice traversing a 2D array. The project starts to get interesting at part 2, when they write the methods that add words into the grid. First horizontally:<br />
<br />
<script src="https://gist.github.com/1428475.js?file=addWordH">
</script><br />
<br />
After they write the method to add words vertically, we can start to refine things. We notice that the routines are essentially the same. The only difference between adding a word horizontally and vertically is what we add to the row and column each time. For one, there is a delta column of + 1, for the other it's a delta row. Further, they realize that adding diagonal words just needs both deltas. This leads us to factoring out the common aspects of the code and writing something like:<br />
<br />
<script src="https://gist.github.com/1428495.js">
</script><br />
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All of a sudden, they've written one piece of code that can add words in 8 orientations.<br />
<br />
After filling the rest of the grid with random letters, we turn our attention to building a random puzzle.<br />
<br />
This part of the project involves using an ArrayList of words. Our students frequently mix up array and ArrayList notation early on so by having a project that uses both but in clearly delineated areas, the students can be more comfortable with each.<br />
<br />
For this piece, the code is again straight forward. Students run a loop that gets a random word from our dictionary and tries to place it in our grid at a random location choosing one of our possible orientations randomly. We get to see another nice little refinement again when we move from the typical first take at building a random puzzle which uses a three (or more) way if statement to select how to add words:<br />
<br />
<script src="https://gist.github.com/1428594.js?file=addWords1">
</script><br />
<br />
to using our more general addWords method described above:<br />
<br />
<script src="https://gist.github.com/1428599.js?file=addWords2">
</script><br />
<br />
<br />
When we're all done, we had some time to project the word search on the board and fun was had by all.<br />
<br />
Peter, another one of our CS teachers had a great suggestion that I think I'll try. Start a competition to have the students modify the program so that it generates as densely packed a wordsearch as possible (giving higher scores first for longer words, then number of words).<br />
<br />
Between the way the project broke down, the topics covered and the little refinements, I really enjoyed working with my classes on this project -- I'm hoping they enjoyed it as well.<br />
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<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-14608364297044544172011-11-27T13:03:00.001-08:002011-11-27T16:23:59.426-08:00RebootA couple of weeks ago, I attended the K-12 workshop at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference. It was great to reconnect with some old friends, make some new ones, and talk shop for the weekend.<br />
<br />
One result was that I promised to start blogging again.<br />
<br />
I've got a number of ideas for posts lined up. Some on pedagogy, some technical, and some cultural. Hope you enjoy them.<br />
<br />
Earlier today Ben Chun tweeted about this post: <a href="http://worrydream.com/SomeThoughtsOnTeaching/">http://worrydream.com/SomeThoughtsOnTeaching/</a>. To summarize -- teachers should practice what they preach. In the post, Bret Victor wonders if there are calculus teachers who spend their evenings doing calculus.<br />
<br />
I know a number of math teachers who spend a considerable amount of their free time working on problems and refining their math skills, I also know many who don't.<br />
<br />
I know wonderful, inspirational teachers in both camps. I've also known weak teachers that fall into both categories. Great teachers in both categories also spend large amounts of time working on how to best deliver instruction.<br />
<br />
Before I started developing the computer science program at Stuyvesant, there were one or two sections of A.P. Computer Science. They were taught by a terrific teacher -- one of my mentors and role models, but he was a math guy and not passionate about CS. When I took over, the enrollment immediately shot up. Not because I was any great shakes, and Dave, the previous teacher was legendary. Rather, the students knew I loved CS. Part of that love was that I enjoy solving problems with computers, coding and what have you. The students can tell.<br />
<br />
The fact that I code is a byproduct of my passion and part of the whole package that defines me as a teacher and a person. Whatever success I achieve is a result of this package. It's something I enjoy, and it also keeps me current with the field.<br />
<br />
I've seen "naturals" who are just great teachers and get by without a passion for their subjects. More often than not, there's a ceiling in terms of what they can give their students either in terms of content, or more importantly, in terms of inspiration. Some times the ceiling is high enough that there isn't a problem.<br />
<br />
Over the years, my "practice" has taken different shapes. Early on, while my students were working on <a href="http://www.usaco.org/">USACO</a> problems. I figured I had better be able to represent, so I started doing them. Later on, I would write systems to support my teaching.<br />
<br />
More recently, I've been lucky enough to be surrounded by a number of like minded educators. We frequently share little projects we work on.<br />
<br />
This semester, I've been taking the Stanford on line <a href="http://ai-class.org/">AI</a> and <a href="http://ml-class.org/">ML</a> classes -- both have been lots of fun.<br />
<br />
This is just what I do and who I am and it is reflected in how I teach.<br />
<br />
Of course, time and job constraints make coding difficult during the school year. With ~150 students, lesson planning, grading, and ancillary responsibilities take their tolls.<br />
<br />
So, I guess I'm an example of what Bret Victor was talking about. I'm not sure I fully agree with his thesis, but it seems to work for me.<br />
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<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-83753384619188088272010-08-15T16:49:00.000-07:002010-08-15T16:49:33.572-07:00The Rest of the Trip<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Now for the rest of the trip.</b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Rome to <span style="font-size: large;">Little</span> Falls</b></span><br />
<br />
We had some trouble getting out of Rome. As always, once we're on trail, it's pretty easy to follow, but entering and leaving towns and cities, with the exceptions of canal side towns like Lockport, can be a challenge. During the day, we found that we could either follow the official Erie Canal Trail signs or the pink trail blazes painted on the streets for the Erie Canal Tour (that preceded us by a week). As we get to towns, the blazes are of little use since they lead to rest stops and camp sites rather than through. We also had the <a href="http://www.ptny.org/guidebook/index.shtml">Cycling the Erie Canal</a> book. It's terrific and I recommend it to anyone riding the canal. It does, however, have one problem. When the path is on the road, it doesn't actually name the road (rather, it superimposes the path line). This made getting out of Rome a chore. Fortunately, we only added one mile to our day before we found our way out.<br />
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<br />
Leaving town we saw Rome's beautifully restored train station:<br />
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Also, the Fort Herkimer Church:<br />
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<br />
The rest of the ride was relatively uneventful.<br />
<br />
We spent the night in Little Falls. Stayed in the "Canal Side Inn," a small in with three rooms. Our's was both huge and gorgeous. It has a connected restaurant. Fine French/American fare. Everything on the menu looked delicious, but after a day of riding, it was a little much. They also had a less expensive, less elaborate grill menu with items like Steak Frites, or scrod in an almond crust served in the lounge. As the lounge was booked, they offered us the grill menu in the main dining room. Food was excellent, including the deserts -- chocolat pot de creme, a meringue filled with strawberries and ice cream, and a blueberry bread pudding.<br />
<br />
If you ever get to Little Falls, eat at the Canal Side Inn.<br />
<br />
Then it was time to turn in.<br />
<br />
<br />
Miles today: 44.5<br />
Miles total: 313.5<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b> Little Falls to Amsterdam:</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b> </b></span><br />
As Little Falls was right next to the canal, leaving town was easy. Just outside of town, we passed the high point of the canal. At the point, a lock with what I think was the canal's largest altitude change.<br />
<br />
It looked to be another uneventful day. More beautiful views that have become de rigueur and more crushed stone path that was more like biking through sand.<br />
<br />
It looked like our two most promising lunch spots were at around 15 miles (too early) and 30 miles (too late). At 15 miles, at Canajoharie, we stopped for ice cream:<br />
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<br />
This was the first time all trip we were able to find mid-day ice cream!!!!!!<br />
<br />
Canajoharie is another one of those small towns we passed through, but they set up a little information stand right where the trail crosses main street. The young man working there directed us to the ice cream.<br />
<br />
One of the things that surprised me throughout was the lack of signage at the towns, particularly the small ones. While the traffic on the trail isn't great, a couple of signs pointing to food and refreshments at the trail heads would cost next to nothing and maybe draw a few more people into the towns.<br />
<br />
Refreshed and refueled, we continued on. After lunch at Fultonville, we soldiered on. A few miles out of Amsterdam, we got to the Schoharie crossing:<br />
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Here, you can see the remains Schoharie aqueduct from the barge canal in the distance:<br />
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<br />
The Schoharie crossing is the one location where there are remnants from all renditions of the canal and one can also see the I90, where the bridge collapsed some 20 years ago.<br />
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It also turns out that this was the site of other historic places:<br />
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We arrived in Amsterdam a short time later. We stayed at the America's Best Value hotel. The only one in town. Looks like new ownership is doing some serious renovations but the rooms were spacious, clean, and nice. BIL Mike and SO Maria live nearby and joined us for dinned. We ate at the on site indian restaurant -- naan and saag paneer -- mmmmm.<br />
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One more day of riding.<br />
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Miles today: 49<br />
Miles total: 362.5<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Amsterdam to Albany:</b></span><br />
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Last day of riding. We estimated about 50 miles. Best lunch possibility was Cohoe s, about 30 miles away. We were hoping to find a snack along the way but figured we'd make it on Nuun and Cliff Bars if needs be. The mileage looked to be formidable, but we also new the whole day would be on paved roads and paved trail.<br />
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Leaving Amsterdam, we saw a couple more historic sites:<br />
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Sad to say, even here, there are ghost bikes:<br />
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Some final pretty views along the way:<br />
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New and old locks:<br />
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A fallen Rock zone complete with fallen rock:<br />
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This bridge that just rose out of nowhere:<br />
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And a family picture sans me:<br />
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And we were at the Cohoes falls:<br />
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We stumbled upon a bike shop that recommended we go to "Bread and Jam" for lunch.<br />
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After lunch, we were down to our last 10 miles.<br />
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Along the way we saw this:<br />
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Clearly owned by the third pig.<br />
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Finally, to the Hudson river, our river:<br />
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We got to Albany early enough that we were able to switch our train tickets, cancel our hotel reservation and get home by 7:00. <br />
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Miles today: 55<br />
Miles total: 417.5<br />
Plus the miles to reconcile with Devorah's count give us: 420<br />
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That's 420 miles in 10 days, right across the state. 46.6 miles a day on average for the ride days. <br />
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We're all a little tired but feeling a sense of pride.<br />
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Next, some reflections on the tour and touring.<br />
<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-41497882411038384182010-08-13T18:01:00.000-07:002010-08-13T18:01:35.837-07:00Too tired to blogGot in to Amsterdam NY a few hours ago. Just finished mapping out tomorrow's route. Hope to get all the details and pictures for the past three days up tomorrow or Sunday. Too sleepy to do it now.<br />
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Miles Yesterday: 44.5<br />
Miles Today: 49<br />
Total: 362.5 (but I think I lost a handful of miles somewhere).<br />
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Tomorrow we make our way to Albany.<br />
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<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-34391887114321066212010-08-13T07:19:00.001-07:002010-08-13T07:19:40.296-07:00No wifi<br>No wifi last night.hopefully tonight.<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-3246267341917134692010-08-11T17:41:00.000-07:002010-08-11T17:41:32.463-07:00All roads may lead to Rome, but not all are pavedToday figured to be one of our longer days mileage wise, we didn't think it would be that tough or tricky to navigate.<br />
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We checked out of our hotel at about 8:30 and hit the road. Streets through Syracuse, up a few hills towards the outskirts of town. Our directions and actual streets didn't quite jive so we had a little trouble finding our way back to the canal path, but once we did we figured it would be smooth sailing. Most of today was along the "Old Erie Canal State Park." A 36 mile linear park stretching from Syracuse to Rome. Just about all of it is off road.<br />
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About 17 miles in we got to Chitenango, birthplace of L. Frank Baum of "Wizard of Oz" fame. We spent some time at their "Canal Boat Museum." It's on the site where they built and repaired canal boats. They've been working to restore as much of the site as possible. This includes the drydocks:<br />
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as well as an 80% sized canal boat they're building:<br />
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Back on the trail, we spotted the remains of sunken canal boat (note the rebar tracing out the boat in the water):<br />
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Continuing on, there were more locks:<br />
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and bridges:<br />
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After lunch in Canastota, we set out on the second 25ish miles of the day. We found our way back onto the path, the stone dust was fine and even some of the road was paved. This lulled us into a sense of security. About 15 miles into the afternoon ride, we crossed path with what appeared to be a trail resurfacing machine. Not a good thing. The next few miles had us hugging the one good edge of the trail. The rest was soft and full of holes. The whole trail was also full of runs of dirt and gullies. All hazardous to us.<br />
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We struggled through and made it to the outskirts of Rome. We followed the last few miles of path, but the path kept degrading. First to a rocky surface, then to one with pools of water, then to no path at all!!!! Fortunately, there was an outlet to a road nearby. We worked our way to it and followed the roads the rest of the way in.<br />
<br />We had made it to Rome.<br />
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After lunch in Canastota, we set out on the second 25ish miles of
the day. We found our way back onto the path, the stone dust was fine
and even some of the road was paved. This lulled us into a sense of
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After checking into the hotel and a cooling dip in the pool, we walked over to fort Stanwix, dating back to the French and Indian war.<br />
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Dinner at the Franklin Hotel (appropriately, Italian food. As they say, when in Rome...).<br />
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Tomorrow we head off to Little Falls.<br />
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Today: 49.5<br />
Total: 269<br />
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<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-70777950597899107782010-08-10T14:58:00.000-07:002010-08-10T14:58:42.402-07:00Nothing to see hereYesterday we left Seneca Falls and headed back north up to Syracuse. Our fifth day in a row of riding. Figured it could be one of the tougher days between the changing terrain and the return of the heat and humidity. Apparently, there's no shade in northern NY.<br />
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Turned out to be true. The first part of the ride was mostly on road. Easy surface, but up and down. When we got to the old canal path, it was more gravely than crushed stone. Felt like we were riding through mush.<br />
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Stopped about 20 mile in for lunch at Jordan. Just about our halfway point of the day and of the trip.<br />
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Unlike other days when we were able to find nice local eateries, today we hat to resort to a single pizza place. Truth be told, it was pretty good but as the pizzeria was hot, we were actually better off eating at the picnic table in the sun out front. <br />
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Back on the trail, there were some nice sights, including remnants from the old canal.<br />
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After 42.5 tough miles, we ended up in Syracuse.<br />
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Hearty appetites in tow, we decided to sample Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. Good. Personally, I prefer the burnt ends at Rub and the overall meal at Hill Country, and those are just a couple of blocks from our house.<br />
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Today was our rest day. Hot and humid -- would have been brutal to ride, but it wasn't a lot of fun walking around town. Not much to tell, just a quiet day. Most things we hoped to see were closed. We did get to the Erie Canal museum -- In the last remaining WeighLock house (sorry, no pictures, accidentally erased what was on my phone). To pay for the original canal as well as it's expansion, tolls were levied on good passing through. To determine the toll, canal boats had to be weighted. At the beginning of each season, weights were determined for each boat. Then, as they moved through the canal, they would enter a weighlock, the water would drain, depositing the boat on a huge wooden cradle which was part of a scale. The boat would be weighed and the toll assessed.<br />
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Here's a picture from wikipedia:<br />
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<br />Note the road in front -- that used to be the old canal. Other than the weigh lock building and a few other artifacts, there's nary a trace.<br />
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The rest of the day was spent walking around and taking it easy.<br />
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<br />Miles from the previous day: 42.5<br />
Total: 219.5<br />
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Tomorrow: All roads lead to Rome.<br />
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</div>Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-12743803543981714632010-08-09T12:22:00.000-07:002010-08-09T12:22:35.543-07:00Day 5<br />
<a href="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_7YN3bkG0cSc/TF9GwanbIJI/AAAAAAAAF78/MLoPnvKbGP8/s1600/IMG_20100808_162329.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_7YN3bkG0cSc/TF9GwanbIJI/AAAAAAAAF78/MLoPnvKbGP8/s200/IMG_20100808_162329.jpg" width="200" /></a>Angel 1: What are the Zamansky's doing next to that bridge?<br />
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Angel 2: Maybe they're pondering if their lives have had any meaning in this world.<br />
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Angel 1: Do you think we should send Clarence to straighten them out? He seemed to do a good job<br />
the last time we had a troubled person on that bridge. He even earned his wings.<br />
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Angel 2: I don't know, maybe they're just trying to decide on where to go to dinner.<br />
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Yep there we were, on the bridge in Bedford, I mean Seneca Falls. The bridge and town that was purportedly used as a model for Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life." But how did we get there? Maybe we should start at the beginning.<br />
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We left our intrepid adventurers last night in Palmyra. After posting, we went to look at the Joseph Smith farm and Sacred Grove, passing the Mormon Temple and Church along the way. This morning after breakfast with what appeared to be a number of "pilgrims" getting ready to worship, we set off.<br />
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Requisite pretty pictures here:<br />
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Passing through all the "port" towns, each with the canal neatly manicured. Straight banks and a narrow channel it's easy to forget that the whole project tied together a number of NY waterways. At points like in the above picture, it's much wider and the banks much more natural.<br />
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We stopped at a hotel in Newark NY for the facilities. Natan noticed this:<br />
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The sign instructs to flush up for liquid waste, down for solid. We decided not to ask. Tim, I don't know if you read this blog, but I think you had a story about this.<br />
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From there we moved from the canal path to the road. After a few miles on Bike Route 5, we ended up in Clyde. Ate at "Brickoven" a restaurant that used to be an industrial bakery.<br />
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Perfect stop for lunch. The corned beef hash I had wasn't great -- tasted like canned. Maybe that's just coming off of the hash I had at the diner in Tonowanda which was truly exceptional. Everything else was terrific and the staff and clientèle as friendly as could be.<br />
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From there it was on route 414 until we got to Seneca Falls. We did some road riding on our first day, but this was our most extensive. We had some stretches of six foot shoulders, but some of three and some of none. Since the roads weren't that busy it wasn't too nerve wracking.<br />
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Interesting though, to see how motorists treat you. Most motorists made attempts to slow down and shift at least partly into the neighboring lane (where oncoming traffic sometimes made this impossible). Every now and then, however, a car would blow by right next to us.<br />
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I particularly noticed a three car caravan that whooshed passed us. The first and third cars were no surprise -- a big honkin SUV and a red sports car. The car in the middle was an ice cream truck -- you know the kind. The small ones that park on a street corner to dispense Good Humor Bars. Complete with those big SLOW <br />
emblems on it. In all fairness to the SUV's most of them gave us wide berth.<br />
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Forty two miles after we started, we ended up in Seneca Falls. It's noted for a number of things including the women's rights movement. There are a number of plaques noting important achievements of women including Amelia Bloomer, Elizbeth Cady Stanton, and others.<br />
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We walked part of the town, passing the church where the first equal rights amendment was proposed:<br />
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The Cayuga - Seneca canal:<br />
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And a neat sculpture garden:</div>
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After dinner, we walked back to our inn. So tired from the day, only 42 miles, but with a fair number of hills that we got a laugh out of this sign:</div>
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Only to realize that it was just poor typesetting:</div>
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Now back at the inn for a good night's sleep.<br />
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Today: 42 miles<br />
Total: 177<br />
Tomorrow: Syracuse<br />
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<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-83507795580997994842010-08-09T04:45:00.001-07:002010-08-09T04:45:54.923-07:00Weak wifi last night<a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/_7YN3bkG0cSc/TF_qbcL2XDI/AAAAAAAAF8w/p4MncXU1KKM/Weak%20wifi%20last%20night_img_1.jpg"><img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/_7YN3bkG0cSc/TF_qbcL2XDI/AAAAAAAAF8w/p4MncXU1KKM/Weak%20wifi%20last%20night_img_1.jpg" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left cursor: pointer;" height="240px" width="320px" /></a><br><br>Weak wifi last night so I wasn't able too post a full report. Hopefully tonight from syracuse. 42 miles yesterday for a total of 177.<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-19438902474733224752010-08-07T16:49:00.000-07:002010-08-07T16:49:48.561-07:00Brockport to PalmyraBeautiful weather today, just like yesterday. Forgot to mention yesterday that Clarence Birdseye started his quick freezing experiments in Brockport.<br />
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Let's start with the requisite canal pics:<br />
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And a picture of my trusty steed:<br />
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We originally figured we'd get lunch at Rochester -- about 18 miles into the ride. If we felt good, we'd try to push on to Pittsford. We were pretty excited when we saw:<br />
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Of course, the entire canal path in Rochester is in park so we rode right through without thinking about it.<br />
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At mile 25, we finally stopped for lunch.<br />
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Pittsford has a nice little park right on the canal. A Bike shop, a couple of other shops, and a few restaurants. We wanted to try the Crepe place, but long lines led us to a third day of medeteranian food. Not bad, and a pretty view of the canal. Besides, since we were eating outdoors, we didn't even have to lock up the bkes.<br />
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We were making much better time than our first two days, but today was a tough one for Batya. She just felt weak all day. On top of that, porta-potties were at a premium. Throughout the trip, we've been surprised by the cleanliness of the porta-potties on the canal route. We've been equally surprised by the irregularity of their spacing. Some times they're at every lift bridge, some time much further apart. Today, there was nothing from shortly after we set out up until lunch. In the afternoon, Batya was ecstatic to find:<br />
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Other than the scenic ride, not too much today en route. We did see the lift bridge in Fairport. It's unique in that it has no right angles and that the two banks are at different levels:<br />
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We also saw: <br />
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<br />I'm also continually amazed at the design and engineering of the canal. We got to one of the locks just as it was about to go into action. Moving water from here:<br />
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<br />To here, and then abck in just a couple of minutes.<br />
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We finished the day in Palmyra where the Mormons got their start. Known for it's "four corners" an intersection with a churh on each of the four corners.<br />
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All in all, a 50 mile day -- new touring best.<br />
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Total Miles: 135<br />
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Tomorrow we head off the canal and down to Seneca Falls.<br />
<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-20608425849626675412010-08-06T17:33:00.000-07:002010-08-06T17:33:10.482-07:00Lockport to BrockportDay 3. From Lockport to Brockport.<br />
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Lockport is "famous" for it's locks -- the two channel 5 step ones. Brockport is famous for it's... brocks?<br />
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After a reasonable nights sleep and breakfast at Hambleton House, our BnB, we were off.<br />
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Here's one of the many lift bridges that cross the canal. Right now it's down. It's raised when a boat has to pass under. Back in the day, as there was much less road traffic, the bridges stayed in the raised position so boats and barges could pass. Stairways took pedestrians to the raised pathway to cross at any time. The bridge only had to be lowered when vehicular traffic had to cross.<br />
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The entire day was spent right along the canal providing for some very pleasant scenery:<br />
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And more lift bridges:<br />
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Crossing a canal aqueduct.<br />
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And here, this aqueduct is the only point at which a road passes under the canal.<br />
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And then to the northern most point of the canal:<br />
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About 22 or so miles in, we stopped at Albion for lunch. After riding around the historic downtown and seeing the cobblestone buildings, we stopped at a coffee shop for lunch, picking up one of their famous SchnickleFritz cookies for a snack later on.<br />
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Here's another lift bridge -- in the up position this time.<br />
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This lift bridge was the sight of a circus stunt gone terribly awry.<br />
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<br />Making it to Holley NY, we realized that we've actually covered a fair amount of ground:<br />
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This was at a park that had a really nice waterfall, but alas, I don't have a shot worthy of sharing.<br />
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From there five more miles to Brockport, the Victorian Inn, showers and dinner at a Greek restaurant.<br />
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Mileage for the day: 47<br />
Total: 85<br />
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This beats both our touring one day total of 42 from McKeesport PA to Connelsville, PA and two day touring total: Mkeesport PA to Ohiopyle PA, 58 miles. It doesn't beat our top day which was 88 miles -- the NY Century (75 mile ride plus an extra 13 afterwards).<br />
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Tomorrow to Palmyra.<br />
<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-468689896075458340.post-87309088852621804922010-08-05T18:25:00.000-07:002010-08-05T18:25:49.239-07:00Erie Canal - Day 2Surpassing our day 1 total of 1 mile wasn't going to be hard. We set out for breakfast. Rode down by the Niagara River and over the Rainbow Bridge. I was a little surprised not to find Asgard on the other side.<br />
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Back in New York, we continued on. Our first stretch was on Bike Route 5:<br />
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Paved but cragly and full of holes. Not very scenic either, at least not until we got closer to Tonowanda where we found the Seabee's memorial:<br />
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What else did we find in Tonowanda?<br />
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The Carousel Museum<br />
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Apparently, Carousel's were made in Tonowanda. One can learn all about them -- making the animals, the Wurlitzer organs, motors, construction, etc. Worth it if you're in the area.<br />
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After lunch at a local diner, the kind where everyone knows everyone and the hash is homemade and tasty, we finally found our way to the canal!!!!!!<br />
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We rode for miles along the canal with brief detours out to the road.<br />
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In this picture, all that green is actually on the canal. It's water chestnuts waiting to be harvested.<br />
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<br />After a stop at the Amherst museum for bathrooms and a cold drink of water, we continued on. A few miles later,<br />
we were in Lockport. Our destination for the night. Lockport is best known for having a two channel five step lock. One side has been replaced with a two step lock and the other is no longer functional but it's still pretty neat.<br />
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From there to our BnB:<br />
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<br />
Pizza and pasta for dinner, and now for a good night's sleep.<br />
<br />
Total miles for the day: 37 for a grand total of 38.<br />
<br />
Tomorrow: 42 miles to Brockport.<br />
<br />
<br />Mike Zamanskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15069276938781711576noreply@blogger.com0