LifeChanger of the Year Nominee Profile

Robert Luciano was nominated by an anonymous student.

Mr. Luciano assigned as essay as a final assignment in his AP Computer Science A class. His nominator decided to write a thank you essay to Mr. Luciano. The full essay is below.

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Dear Mr. Luciano,

The AP test is over. This is a point which I always imagined being inherently future. Since 2018, I could see myself sitting in your AP class in a larger than life sort of way. It’s probably to do with the lore surrounding Java at Pocono Mountain East. My brother used to talk about how the class was different than any of his others. I could see it in his homework; he would be writing computer code on a page in his notebook or counting out syllables for a haiku! This made the class seem strange and alternative. My classmates would talk in whispers about how they had “found” your YouTube channel. “Did you know he does magic?”

In my sophomore year, I enrolled in Intro to Java. [I was] pretty confident of myself and endlessly anticipating how the class would hold up to my expectations. The first thing that I noticed was the "Hall of Fame" on the wall with the names of all of the people who had passed the AP Computer Science A exam. Hundreds of name that included “Kyle Danges 2008,” and “Amanda Anglemire 2015,” and “Michael Olsen 2018.” I knew and respected all [of] these people, and I hoped that somewhere in the future, my name would be up there.

Now, as I sit as a soon-to-be senior, whether I make the  "Hall of Fame"or not is not my ultimate concern. What is more profound is the exposure to a different way of thinking that is fostered in that classroom. This “thinking” manifests itself in different ways. It's a different way of running a class: I don’t think I could ever get away with anything like cheating on tests, eating in class, getting work turned in late, cutting class, or even being off-task in a group activity. I owe this to the culture you form when walking in the door. You are always ready with the class layout and the day’s or even week’s lessons. You write them on the whiteboard. Even on days that throw you off the preordained schedule, you show the class how to readjust and move with the punches, whether they are announcements, assemblies, early dismissals, power outages, or a worldwide pandemic. In addition, you are...upfront about how your grades and tests work. Being candid leads to an “unemotional” grading system which reduces everybody’s stress. Who cares what you got on the test? This class is about what is happening now. What are we learning today? What are you going to do about your grade on the next test? 

This seems revolutionary when it comes to a class, but what about the classroom? The micro society fostered in the computer science courses is wildly different, too. Encouraging collaboration is one thing, but that’s all talk. You have isolated the barrier to entry for group problem solving: sometimes, you just don’t like other people. Or you just think that you don’t. I can say at least a handful of nice things about every partner I have had in your class. I think that it's because you force us to get to know one another. The classroom at large creates a group of people who have this unique group personality, if that makes sense. Everything is about “what thought do you have to answer this problem?” Half of it is analytical, and the other half is rather humanitarian. That latter half represents itself in your inspirational quote of the week and your sometimes rather school-inappropriate sense of humor. The most tangible of this culture I think of is the fact that on my AP exam, at the bottom of my last line of code, I typed a comment that just said, “I hope whoever is grading this is having a good day.” 

So the two halves of the thinking which I have laid out above, is what I think makes the class so special. You asked this essay to contain positives and negatives, but I can honestly say, as long as a student comes into class with an open mind, they will do well and have a good time. It felt good to analyze all of that, but I know that you know all this stuff. It was not unintentional. So the productive part of this letter is just to say thank you for teaching me things great and small. Keep the culture alive, Mr. L, I know you will.