I'm concerned that we are just doing people's homework for them. That's no way to encourage people to actually learn the math.

There's a bit of a dilemma here, although I basically agree with Rom. Where, possible, I will try to point someone in the direction of some resource that can help them. The trouble with trying to "teach" is that, if there are a lot of questions to be answered, you can't spend five [or more] minutes on one single question while others are waiting. If the others dont see their questions being answered in a reasonable amount of time, they will just go somewhere else.

What to do ????

i think you just summed up this website

Rom: I absolutely agree with you. In some cases, we could lead these kids in the right direction, and let them learn by trying to finish the work. Initially, I only gave the final answer, and often asked the kid to finish the work and see if he/she could get the same answer. But, apparently many people seem to disagree. I don't know what the solution is. It's one thing for a retired person asking a question about his/her annuity and getting the answer they want. But, it's an entirely different matter when young kids are learning basic skills of arithmetic, algebra or calculus.....etc., to have their home work done for them, often without having a clue about the steps that went into solving their problems.

We are on the website, because we have a genuine desire to help and teach these kids. The school systems and their teachers are often a bunch of incompetent people, and couldn't care less if the children understand the subject or not. They just put in their 8-hours a day, collect their pay and go home. That is the reason why Western students do so poorly in International Math and Science tests compared to their counterparts in Eastern countries.

Guest # 5

Stop your nonesense. Not everybody thinks like you do. Many of us have children AND grandchildren.

What if people gave away the method, not the answers?

In my opinion, that would be a much better way to go.

I Know!

Hi Rom and guests,

Thank you Rom for raising this issue for discussion. It is an issue that always concerns me.  

I have already written some of my views in my new "What is Happening Thread"

I do agree with you Rom.  I do not want question askers to be given just the answer, and most times I do not think that they should be given the whole answer either.  I am aware that i am often guity of doing this myself but I know it is not ideal.

I want the asker to be encouraged to interact with the anwerer.  Most of these askers are children.  Some are over confident and not very polite BUT others find us, as adults, and also mathematics, very intimidating.   Although I want the children to learn from us it must also be remembered that their communication and maths skills may be very rudimentary.  Even if they can learn what we are teaching they may not have the language (maths or English) to ask their question or respond to us in a completely correct manner. 

I am not disagreeing with you Rom.  You have expressed something that I have said many times.  I just want answerers to be sensitive to the askers.  Just offer them something that they may find helpful.  They may not get the full answer that they were hoping for but I do not want them going away and disliking maths and disliking maths teachers and feeling more inadequate than they did before they came.

I think that offering an appropriate "mathsisfun" or "purple math"s site or a you tube clip is often the VERY BEST answer that can be given.

In my "What is Happening " post I also said that I want answerers to work together and support each other.  If one is trying to teach a student and that means they have NOT given the student the entire answer I would like other answerers to consider very carefully before they race in and offer up a full solution.  I think that it is important that answerers do not undermine one another.

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WEll guest, I think that you have been answering a lot of questions and I really like your syle.  You are sensitive to how the child might be feeling but you rarely give full answers.  I think this is great.

I would vert much like you to become a member.  It is very ease.  You just need to choose a username and a password, that is it!  As a member you will become known and your answers will carry the credibility that you have earned.  Please think about it, it would be so much nicer if you had a name.  If for some reason you really do not want to do this, perhaps you could just put a name of your choice at the bottom of each of your posts. (But it would be much better if you joined up.)  

Hi Chris,

I have only just seen your response.

Yes you are right, we cannot even attempt to teach everyone.

Here are some ideas:

Sometimes we could make up a very similar question and leave the real question for the asker to do.

for example

If the question is  solve,

3x+7=19

we could instead solve

4x+2=26

Or we could send the off to another resource, although that would be more time consuming for us.

Just a couple of thoughts there.  :)

I think that you are right that we are doing people's prep but I think that the best idea is to show the method - NOT the answer.

All right, so it might be a little too easy for children to get answers to their homework here. However I do hope it's also apparent that there are children here that actually find this forum useful and learn something from our answers? We could indeed improve by giving methods instead of answers however I think this is not very helpful as the poster will still not know if he/she can apply the method correctly. Surely he/she could upload his/her own answers to his website, but this will probably be another threshold as they might feel that still doing it wrong would be considered 'dumb'. Therefore I think Melody provides an excellent solution here by applying the method to a similar problem. 

Sometimes you are just lazy and ask for the answer but even when you are just given the answer you can learn a lot, (I know I hav :)

I think the real solution for this. Is giving what Melody said, 'half-answers'. We could do some of the work for them, but not all.