by Joe Wetzel
Editor
"I just go to Joe Random mall to get my hair cut," replies Jim Greenlee when asked the very intriguing question, "Where do you get your hair cut?"
On the first day of each of his classes, Greenlee points out that he wants to be called "Jim", which sets the informal tone for all of his lectures. Despite his entertaining lectures, Jim is known as a demanding instructor who believes in making up the very difficult tests in order to get a "good grade distribution" and adds long programming assignments to the required workload.
But Jim justifies his great expectations on students by saying, "I went through it too... but when students graduate employers know [the new employees] can cope with anything." He added that his teaching philosophy would have to be "learn by doing it."
He has what is called "Primary Responsibility" for CS 2430 (Control and Concurrency) and CS 2760 (Introduction to Instruction Set Architecture and Machine Level Programming), which means he is the faculty member who teaches each course most often (2 or 3 times each year). Jim also has secondary responsiblity for CS 3431 (Operating Systems and Data Management) and CS 3765 (Computer Organization Laboratory).
In addition to these normal class instruction responsibilities, he is also rotating with a group of students in Senior Design (CS 4306 and CS 4307). Jim mentions that when a student signs up for 4306, that student is obligated to sign up for 4307 the next quarter, and the instructor rotates with the students in the classes. Teams of three to five students are formed two work on group projects. For example, one group of four students is working on a world-wide-web based overload request system, and another is creating a graphical user interface for unix tools.
But life, even for Jim "We're thinking of doing a 'Geek of the Week' column..." "Can I be the inaugural member?" Greenlee is not restricted to the computer science department at Tech. Most importantly, Jim has a wife and three children. In fact, he is the den leader for his son's Webolos pack.
Jim's non-computer science interests include scuba-diving (he serves as an instructor for OPTIONS) and playing several instruments.
To get to where he is now, Jim suvived Tech, as all of us hope to. Jim graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and stayed at Tech to earn his Master's in Information and Computer Science. Jim's Master's work was cenered in systems, languages, and hardware.
Upon earning his Master's degree in June 1987, Jim did some consulting with a small Atlanta company for six months. In December of 1987, Jim was asked back to Tech to teach. He has been teaching at Tech since then, with the exception of one brief hiatus during the first half of 1993. During the hiatus, Jim taught at a Sun training facility; doing corporate training of systems administration, shell programming, and similar subjects.