Also moved in to teaching high school CS. It's hard but the kids are great. I've found that it's a lot less about doing a great job explaining loops or whatever and more about mentorship and getting kids excited about the topic. If anyone's interested in making the switch my email is in my bio, I'd be happy to chat.
This is a great take. Having been a kid that was super intrigued by CS, the classes were more a formality, and a place to ask the few questions I couldn't put into words very easily for an internet search. Not to say classes weren't important, but I can definitely speak to it being more about getting kids intrigued than just going through the curriculum.
As a complete side note, I think it would have been easier to learn programming if I had started with some lower-level CS, not high-level programming. Some concepts behind even high-level programming don't make a lot of sense to a newbie unless they understand what the limitations of a machine are, and why they inherently exist.
