[From Lenny and Ken]


For TAs:

1) TAs should be more like reference books for the groups.  
   There were  TAs taking very active roles and starting to
    code or define database schemas for their groups.

    Being a reference should apply to the course in general.  In
     the regular exercises, it's very easy for a TA to get carried 
     away and start to recode everything that a person is doing.  
     Some times, rather than help the person to solidify key concepts,
     this serves to only confuse and overwhelm.  When asked how to
     do something, try not only to answer the question, but to show the
     person how they could find the answer in the books.  After all, we
     can't always ask a TA.


2) There are three types of students:
      a) Those who come over and ask you to take a look at something.
      b) Students that look up when they have a problem and hope to see
          a TA.
      c) Ones who will stare at the same line of code for 3 hours and
       would not ask.

       Look around the room to make eye contact with type (b) and
        identify the ones in the (c) cluster.  Make sure you check
        up on the (c) from time to time and ask them if everything
        is fine.

3) The people are here to be empowered - not to learn how to make
    a perfect HTML page.  If a person keeps asking you, "How do you
    change the background color?  How do you center the text?  How
    do you make it bold?" show them an HTML howto page and explain 
    where to look up the answers.  That will benefit them more than
     typing out the actual tags.

4)  For 99.9% of the cases, the person should understand why you
    modified something in their code.  If they don't, it isn't worth
    changing, just because that is a 'better way'.  

    DO NOT WRITE A LOT OF CODE FOR THE PERSON.  That serves no purpose.
    Many students complained about having all of their script rewritten
    and having no idea what happened.  They then try to make
    modifications to it and cannot, as they don't know how it works.  
    Several hours later, they end up going back to their original script,
    This is not productive.