ATTN: Advocates of Learning Math (It more of a rant than a question)?

Question

I will become a high school math teacher in the fall, I'm student teaching next semester. It astonishes me how a student can come on this site, type in their homework and get the answers. I don't have a problem with somebody asking for clarification or to do one problem for an example but students are posting their entire homework on here and are getting answers! As a future math teacher I believe practice makes perfect and homework is essential to learning math. And if the students are getting the answers from here they are not learning and are going to fail the tests and maybe even the standardized state tests that will lead them to not graduate. Any ways I am just wondering if any one else feels the same and if any one has advise on how to assign homework where they cannot get answers from off of here.

Answer 1

I think most questions are just single questions, maybe one

that is hard for them.  If someone posts multiple questions on one request (their whole assignment) I usually post an answer telling them to post one problem per question.  If they post multiple questions to get homwork answers, they will pay eventually, by failing tests, etc. as you know.  They are only hurting themselves. Eventually they will realize this....things will work out by themselves.  I wouldn't worry about those cheaters who use this site to get whole assignment answers...they will pay....I'd worry about the students who want to learn, who need and seek help.  Let your expertise shine through to the students who want your help...you will have the satisfaction of doing a lot of good where it's needed...don't forget you will know as the semester progresses which students care and which do not.

Answer 2

Let me get this straight.  You are going to be a math teacher and you actually WANT students to do well in math?  You are kidding, right?

Why do you think math teachers are often paid more than teachers of other subjects?  Is is because math is hard!  If it isn't hard enough for your students, then your job is to make it harder.  That is how you make sure there won't be too many future math teachers bidding down the math teacher salaries.

I'm a retired electrical engineer.  Why do you think electrical engineers are paid so much?  We weed out most engineering students during the first two years of college.  How do we weed them out? Math!  Most of the math courses we take are useless to our future careers.  But if we didn't weed them out with hard math classes, engineers would be a dime-a-dozen.

And NO, I am not being facetious!

Answer 3

It's true the ones who do what you describe are cheating themselves as much as anyone else.  But I'm not sure there's much that you can do about it, short of shutting the whole thing down (and the one at Google, and any others).

If you require that homework be handwritten, then at the very least

they would have to hand copy whatever they get here.

I think also that it will be quite evident from class participation and tests

who is doing his own work and learning and who is not.

If there is a big disconnect between flawlessness on homework

and cluelessness in class, you'll see through them pretty quickly.

Another trap would be to have them do a short homework add on

at the start of class before they hand in their assignments.

If they had 20 problems to do overnight, and it's an easy

problem just designed to see who understands the material and

who doesn't, they should be pretty well practiced and one more won't

take a long time.

The online world poses lots of challenges in education and everywhere

else and there's no going back, so the schools will just have to adapt

to it, since the benefits outweigh the detriments.

It's also the case that while it may seem from reading these pages

that half the kids in the world are on here getting their homework done,

even if there are thousands, it's out of a population of perhaps millions.

It's probably no more than a handful from every school, so I don't think

it will be as big a problem as it might seem.  When you determine

some kid is not doing his own work, you talk to him and point out that

he really needs to study and do his own learning.  He won't always

have someone to do it for him.

Addendum:

I think that when someone dumps 20 homework problems

into one question they are much less likely to get them

answered anyway.  I for one close questions like that an

instant after opening them.  They're not interesting to

answer, and they don't benefit the asker, so there's no

point.