I have been asked to fill in for one of the tutors for a computer networking course. It seems that he was not able to finish the semester (only half of the semester left now). I have two, 2 hour sessions on Wednesday and today was my first try. I had only about 10 students in the first lab and about 5 in the second and I think I did better in the 2nd session then the first.
To tell you the truth I am not sure that enough of the first session students even understood me. We had to go quite slowly as the students had a very bad understanding of the basic network functions. I had people fumbling with, socket() bind() and accept() I wouldn’t have minded if that was what we were supposed to cover, but it seems that they took this stuff about a month ago.
Also I had this bad feeling that 2 kids were laughing about me, but a just told myself that I was just been silly and even if they were it doesn’t matter :). I gradualy worked them towards select() which was the end goal (a multi-client echo server to be exact -they call it an IRC server-
).
I felt that I did better in the 2nd session because I was more focused and I got some feedback about the state of the students from my first session. I also attended Bobs (the senior tutor and a lecturer) 1st session today so that helped me a lot.
So even thought I was really scared that I would be exposed for the impostor I try and convince myself I am not, I was able to go through with not too many casualties.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out 