Course Support

Your primary resource for help in this course should always be office hours. I am excited to be at a school like Rhodes, where I have the opportunity to work 1:1 with you. In my experience, there is no substitute for office hours!

I have office hours MWF 2-4:30. In the past, I have found that teaching COMP251 creates a high demand for office hours. In order to prevent students from having to wait indefinitely when there is a queue of students wanting help, I take appointments for office hours.

So, you have two options for getting help during office hours:

• Come by my office and wait for me to be available (first-come, first-served).
• Make an appointment at calendly.com/lang-cal.

You can always see my schedule on the eInk display/microcontroller outside my office.

Tutoring

Tutoring is Sunday-Thursday night 5-8pm.

This course has tutoring support. Your tutors will be available in the systems lab (on the second floor, on the opposite end of the building from the CS lounge). The room code is 0337#.

Computer Systems TAs for Spring’23:

How to use tutoring

Tutoring is a place where you can get help with specific questions from peers who have taken 251 before. It is important that you come to tutoring with a specific question in mind; this can be a concept that you don’t understand, a location in a project where you are stuck, etc.

Tutors will help you work through conceptual misunderstandings by explaining things in different ways and from the perspective of a student who was in your situtation not long ago. They will also help you get unstuck in a project by helping you use the tools available to you–whether these are actual tools (i.e., gdb) or conceptual tools (e.g., print debugging, reading error messages, etc.).

Dos and Don’ts

Do:

• Expect your tutor to ask questions.
• Be prepared to explain what you have tried.
• Go work independently after the tutor has given you some advice about how to find a bug.
• Be ready to explore resources that your tutor provides to you.
• Expect your tutor to refer you to office hours.

Don’t:

• Expect your tutor to tell you the correct answers.
• Go ask how to get started.
• Sit with a tutor and code/do work.
• Expect a tutor to write code for you.
• Use tutoring as a substitute for office hours.

Signing in

You will be expected to sign in to tutoring. I require the tutor to do this and to keep a record of who has come to tutoring. This is for several reasons, one of which is to determine the demand for tutoring and to justify the budget that we spend on tutoring.

Bias or other incidents

Tutors for 251 have gone through a bias training. If you feel as though you have experienced bias from a tutor, please report the instance to me, either directly or through my feedback form.

---