After working at CCHS for 27 years, beloved computer science teacher, Anthony Beckwith, will retire this year.

Mr. Beckwith became interested in math and computer science in high school, as “they both just seemed fun.” Later in college, he majored in math and took electrical engineering and computer science courses.  He remarks that “being able to code gives you such interesting and fun powers.” 

It is difficult to find excellent teachers in computer science because there are many higher-paying jobs in the computer science field, so our school is lucky to have a teacher as amazing as Mr. Beckwith.  When asked why he chose to become a teacher, he explains, “After college, I didn’t really have a desire to pursue pure mathematics or things like actuarial science, so I just got some odd jobs for a while. At one point, I started substitute teaching in the Boston Public Schools — just for the money — and I realized that I really enjoyed working with teenagers.  That led to me going part-time to pursue my Masters in Teaching and eventually teaching at CCHS.” What Mr. Beckwith loves about teaching is that he gets to both code himself and teach others how to code. Throughout his career at CCHS, he learned Java and Python, which led to the creation of those courses.  Without him, our school’s computer science program would be nowhere close to how it is today.  Mr. Beckwith remarks, “I could have made more money in a CS job, but it would not give the same satisfaction as getting hundreds of students excited about learning the thing that I found so fun and engaging.”

Mr. Beckwith has gained much knowledge and experience through his time teaching here.  He has learned that “teenagers always have more complicated internal lives than one might think, and so a teacher shouldn’t make assumptions that they know what is going on with them.” Another thing he learned is that “giving students freedom to come up with their own ideas to pursue is powerful.” 

Looking back at his career, he is proud of having taught himself several computer programming languages and creating CCHS courses for those languages.  These courses attracted enough students to teach computer science full-time.  He is also proud of the number of students who started computer science with him and pursued it in college and for work.  In addition, he is proud of his efforts to get more under-represented groups to take computer science courses.

Now, Mr. Beckwith can take a break from all his hard work.  After retiring, he remarks, “I look forward to not being in a rush. I look forward to not filling out paperwork or doing trainings. I look forward to long, meditative bike trips, spending time with my family, and spending more time in nature.”

For new teachers starting out with their careers, he would like to tell them to “get to know your students as well as possible and remember that decisions they make each day are based on external and internal pressures, so don’t take things personally.”

Thank you for all of your hard work, Mr. Beckwith! We will greatly miss you!