Learning to fish one painful question at a time (or: Can SO function as a TA?) [closed]

Question

By TA I mean the (largely US, I think) role of Teaching Assistant, who helps students work through course material.

I'm finding myself unable to come up with a good way to help venkysmarty, who comes to SO with a significant number of algorithm questions. These questions are all good questions, on topic and generally clear enough, given the user is a non-native English speaker. The user is asking for explanations and guidance, rather than plz-send-me-teh-codes, so that's another plus point.

I can't help but think that getting a copy of CLRS (I think), working through it, and turning to SO when stumped, is a really painful way of learning algorithms.

What can we do?

* edit *

to clarify, I'm not complaining; it's just I feel really sorry for the guy, this is going to be so much harder than it would be with the availability of just a little face-to-face teaching.

Answer 1

His account looks clean, and the questions are of much higher caliber than I have seen from many students that try to ask questions here. There's not much to do from a moderator perspective; I've seen far worse problems here. I would simply continue to answer his questions, if you feel like doing so.

For problematic users (those who fall below the threshold of clarity and usefulness), you can simply downvote, vote to close and flag. There are plenty of examples of people who cut and paste assignments, use broken English, and in general show little effort. Those folks deserve little mercy.

But that's not the case here.