I'm a teacher at community college, and I just wanted to let you know that my students will be posting mathematics questions in the next few months as part of a class project. All of their UserNames will start out with CCA_, so they should be easy to spot. I'm encouraging them to become critical thinkers, so they may ask you for additional clarification or sources of information.

The intention is not for them to submit all their homework, but to seek clarification on particular problems or mathematical subjects. I'll be keeping an eye on the forum and chiming in occasionally. If I comment on your answer, please don't think I'm second-guessing you, I'm just giving students additional feedback from someone they consider (hopefully) an authoritative source.

CCA_Slates,
Welcome to Answerpool.com. It is nice to know that you have so much confidence in this site and us members.

OfCourse, I will be more than pleased to help them out. Afterall, that is the reason I signed in to Answerpool (However, I ended up asking Questions myself!)

Umn.. could you tell what grade students you teach_so we should know till what level to explain, and how comprehensive do we need to be.
Pin~Jinx

Thank you for your interest! I teach "developmental math" at community college, which is basically pre-algebra and algebra review up through quadratic equations. My students are all adults, many of whom are returning to college after several years to get a two-year degree, or start their four-year degree.

I have one class (pre-algebra) that covers negative integers, decimals, fractions, percents, powers, roots, and simple (linear) algebraic equations. I have two other classes (introductory algebra) that get as far as solving simple quadratic equations. My students are not necessary math enthusiasts (unlike us), so they like examples and lots of steps, to make the concepts as painless as possible.

Welcome to the Jungle. I have a suspicion that you are a good enough teacher that your students may eventually answer questions. Now, wouldn't that be a measure of their confidence!

Thank you for a project which has the potential to help make this site even better.

Unfortunately, there will be far fewer students submitting questions in this forum than I originally anticipated. For the class project, I gave the students several options, and out of over 50 students in three classes, so far only one has elected to do the Internet project.

Surprisingly (at least it surprised me), the overwhelming majority of students decided to do extra homework assignments from their textbook, which is actually one of the more labor-intensive options (certainly much harder than the Internet option). However, the homework option requires the least amount of creativity, and despite the labor involved, this seemed to be the deciding factor for most students.

You should be seeing a few posts from my students in the next couple of weeks (hopefully I'll get at least a few more Internet projects). Sorry I didn't get you more customers, but it looks like this forum has already grown enough to keep you fairly busy.

Like they say in baseball, wait until next year.

If any of my students are reading this, I just wanted to encourage you to submit your questions. If you've already registered, then all you have to do is hit the Ask/Post button at the top of the page, then use the form to post your question.

Unless the answers get really weird, I won't be posting any replies to your question; I'll let you sort out other people's answers and figure out what makes sense. Remember, you can always post a reply to your own question to ask someone to explain their answer more, and I encourage you to do this if you don't understand something.

Please don't be intimidated by the level of the other questions in this forum. All of the people here are happy to answer any question, including algebra questions. By the way, if you want to refer to exponents in your question, you can just use the ^ key (Shift 6). You can use the asterisk (Shift 8) for multiplication and the slash for division and use parentheses to clarify order of operations. So you could write something like

4x² - 8x + 2
¾¾¾¾¾¾¾
       4x

as

(4x^2 - 8x + 2) / 4x

and people will understand exactly what you mean.

[This message was edited by CCA_Slates on 10-16-02 at 08:19 PM.]