Working in a corporate job behind a desk, Carol Yarbrough dreamed of being in front of a classroom of students. She patiently waited for the timing to be right, while working her way up the corporate ladder.  Her jobs included being a computer programmer at BellSouth and Senior Technical Architect at Accenture. Finally, both she and her family were in the right circumstances for her to pursue her ultimate goal of teaching. She went to University of Alabama at Birmingham and earned a Master’s degree in education to supplement her dual undergraduate degrees in Math and Computer Science from Rochester Institute of Technology. She expected to be a math teacher upon completion of her graduate studies.

Her first teaching job was math at a middle school. Just a few months in though, she was questioning whether she had made the right choice. Many days she’d come home frustrated and overwhelmed. She struggled with students who were not at the level they should have been and she felt like more time was spent on discipline instead of teaching math. She says, “Many of the students weren’t interested in learning math. They had so many other things that were going on in their lives that took precedence over doing their schoolwork.” Mid-year she was ready to quit and call it a mistake, but she felt like she’d made a commitment and decided to finish out the school year and then reassess.  

Her son James, was attending ASFA in the Math & Science department. Yarbrough loved ASFA, the students, the community and the faculty. As fate would have it, there was an opening for a Geometry teacher for the following school year and Yarbrough decided to apply as her last effort to stick to her dream of teaching. What she wasn’t expecting though, was department chair Hungsin Chin, to talk her into teaching computer science classes. Yarbrough agreed as long as she could still teach a math class or two.

Nine years later, Yarbrough is fully invested in her chosen career as one of country’s leading computer science teachers. She loves her job because she says, “students at ASFA are interested and engaged and it’s fun to teach students who are enthusiastic. When the kids complete a project, they will literally jump up and down and scream, ‘it worked, it worked!’”

Last year Yarbrough taught Computer Science Principles, AP Computer Science and Databases. Though her classroom is in the Math-Science department, she teaches both Math-Science and arts students.

“Computer Science Principles is a perfect class for arts kids. There is a lot of room for creativity and personal expression. It provides another medium for them. It is also such an advantage for them to have computing skills. It is essential now to be able to do that.” She has about 17 arts students enrolled in Computer Science Principles. Yarbrough says that the Advanced Placement Computer Science class is even structured with some similarities to an AP art class. Students are required to create a project that they work on throughout the semester that is then submitted to the AP College Board for grading; similar to an art portfolio. One example of the melding of arts and computers that has come out of Yarbrough’s class is recent Visual Arts graduate, Rachel Moeller who went on to Carnegie Mellon and is studying both Visual Arts and Computer Science.

Even though many would agree that computer science is an essential to modern life, teaching computer science is high school is still fairly rare. Yarbrough was one of the first CS teachers in Alabama. Her AP CS Principles class at ASFA was part of the national three year pilot school program run by the College Board who governs AP classes.  The course was developed with support from the National Science Foundation.

Yarbrough also has worked closely with a committee spearheaded by University of Alabama Computer Science professor Dr. Jeff Gray. Through their recommendations two specific computer science courses now count as a math credit towards graduation in Alabama.

“We mapped all the learning objectives for computer science courses to those existing math courses to show that computer science will teach students all of the things that have already been deemed necessary in math courses,” Yarbrough said. “I was amazed that it was almost a complete mapping. Now, other states are using Alabama’s mappings to make the case for their computer science courses to count towards graduation too,” she added. Alabama is only the 15th state in the nation to count computer science courses as credit for graduation.

Currently Yarbrough is working as a CS Content Specialist through a collaboration between the organizations, A+ College Ready and Code.org and the Alabama state Department of Education. The goal of the collaboration is to train 50 additional Alabama computer science teachers. Yarbrough will be coaching new teachers on how to instruct the CS Principles class. In addition to helping those teachers, Yarbrough spent part of the summer in Georgia and Texas teaching even more future computer science teachers at the College Board’s AP Summer Institutes.

“It feels good to have the teachers I train get excited about teaching computer science and to know they will in turn excite their students. It is so important that students have a foundation in computer science.  If they are excited and engaged about the subject it makes such a difference. Computer science is an extraordinarily important skill that is essential for every students’ future success.”