Comment by tombert

I think for at least a couple of the students, they really did learn the subject well.

A couple students took me up on my offer to do private tutoring [1], and I do think that they benefited from it. A couple of them would even ask interesting follow-up questions [2].

Of course, there's a pretty strong selection-bias there: if they are actively looking for help from a professional, they probably have some interest in the subject matter, so it's difficult to know how much I helped compared to them just looking things up on Google and/or doing the homework, but I would like to think that I helped at least a little more than they would have had otherwise.

[1] On my own free time; I wasn't given any direct budget for office hours.

[2] e.g. one person became extremely interested multithreading and multiprocessing, and so I pointed him to the ZeroMQ guide and walked him through some basic farmout patterns...I should see how he's doing actually, I think he has a lot of potential.