[qpleple]

I've been TAing Computer Science 101 (Design of algorithms) four times now, and I cannot agree more with this post.

Having to teach something forces you to go one step deeper in your level of understanding. When it's only for yourself, you stop when you get the idea. And this is good enough. But when you know you will have to present it in front 200+ students, then you make sure you really understand it. You can't help it, your mind is trying to find edge cases, to put it in a another context, ...

Same as Nate, I first enrolled as a TA because it was paying my tuition fees. But I got a whole new enlightening understanding of the algorithms we study in 101: Divide and Conquer, graph algorithms (DFS/BFS/Dijkstra/Bellman-Ford/Kruskal/Prim/...), greedy algorithms, NP-hard reductions, etc. I now genuinely enjoy thinking about algorithms, or proving one algorithm is correct, or deriving the time complexity analysis. Now I TA really because I enjoy it, money is just a side benefit.