• The GTA for this section was Gedare Bloom. While far from perfect, he was one of the best GTAs I've encountered at GW - his lessons (lectures/presentations, mixed with practicals/inclass activities) where generally clear, definitely informative, and meaningfully added to the material of the course. He responded very well to questions - and, also, was frank about when he didn't know the answer (unlike many, who would either dismiss the question or give a purely guessed answer; Gedare would typically provide his educated guess, but he would label it as such). [Early on (the first two labs) he came across as gruff, aggrevated, dismissive, and unhelpful, but those qualities *never* resurfaced later in the semester, so I can only presume something else was affecting him those first two weeks] For the (graded) coding assignments, more information about what was being sought would have been appreciated - many times points were taken off for things we didn't realize were required (due to ambiguity in the ass
• This lab was pretty much useless. Nothing was learned in the lab. It was yet another horrible experience just like the class!
• Gedare was honestly one of the worst TAs I've ever had. His only redeeming feature is that he has a solid grasp on the English language, unlike some of the other TAs I've had from the CS department. His grading policies are arbitrary, he takes off points for things not in assignment specifications, saying we should just know to do said things (not code commenting, but other things, like the file permissions from the second project; that was not in the specs nor did we ever learn it). Linux kernel source and professional-grade C programming skills are not innate. He should not grade or teach as if they are. He is a poor lecturer at best; he gets up and reads off the Powerpoint slides, then tells us to Google up answers if we have any questions. I will grant him that if you go to his office hours and ask a question, he will try to explain it to you and does a fairly adequate job, but he is very snarky and will say "oh, but you should have known that already" to almost anything you ask. The lab itself was