Algebra Home Work Help

Every student needs help with homework once in a while, and as long as that help strengthens his understanding,  it’s a good thing. However, when homework help results in the student passing off other people’s work as his own, it gives a teacher the wrong signal and hurts the student in the long run. Teachers need to know that when a student does not understand something, and the quality of a student’s homework is a good way or teachers to identify students that require additional help. Homework help, therefore, needs to handled very carefully – too little can result in frustration, and too much can deprive students of the mental struggle required to be able to handle exams on their own.

At SchoolTrainer, we remind our students that we limit the amount of homework help that we will provide to each student. We recognize that there are many websites where students exchange homework answers with other students, and we know that it’s impossible to stop students from helping each other. Also, if a student needs algebra help, there are free automated online tools that can help students solve problems. SchoolTrainer also offers e-mail based homework help, providing answers to homework problems overnight, but we limit the service to two answers per day per student, and we require the students to adhere to our Honesty Policy and not try to pass off our answers as their own. Students should not depend on our homework help service to impress their teachers, but to learn how to solve problems on their own – in fact, they can even use our homework help service to confirm that their answers are correct, or to check the answers of problems that they have made up on their own.

Clearly, excessive reliance on homework help websites can lead to an unhealthy dependence. Our view is that if a student needs help (algebra and calculus can be particularly challenging at first), a tutor can often help them simply by asking questions at each stage of problem solving. Students are often surprised that they arrive at the right answers, only with a minimal involvement by a homework helper. We believe, like Socrates, that any student can arrive at the right answer if you ask the student the right questions.

Homework help, therefore, is not about providing students with homework answers, which anyway are often available online. Rather, homework help is about making the process of doing homework more enjoyable and productive. A good tutor identifies where a student’s true weakness is. For example, a student who has a good grasp of physics, may still struggle because he or she really needs algebra help. A good tutor will recognize this and point out this weakness to the student so that the student can become more efficient. Good homework help is really about good coaching, not good answers.