When do you answer people's maths questions?

Question

Personally I like doing it because it's something I'm knowledgeable in and I like explaining how to get to a certain result, the methods involved and the reasoning behind those methods. Although I put a lot of time into some of my answers and I feel I've wasted my time if the person asking the question wasn't actually interested in learning at all and just wanted answers for their homework.

That's not to say I'm against homework questions, I just want someone to learn from my answers, and people who don't read or try to follow the bulk of what I (or other people who answer questions beautifully) type won't get anything out of it.

I like helping people learn, so I often try to explain everything I do so people can replicate it for solving similar problems in the future. To do this I need to know what they understand so far so I know what they struggle on.

Which brings me to my actual question:
What sort of maths questions do you like answering here?

I appreciate it when there's a question where the person asking it has shown they at least attempted the question, so that I know they are genuinely stuck and need help, and I can easily see where they went wrong and explain why what they did was wrong. 

Questions I really dislike are the ones that are just a block of 5-10 questions, obviously directly copied from a textbook. Textbook work is boring, so I assume people who do that just don't want to do their work, or don't care enough to learn how.

What are your thoughts?

BONUS QUESTION:
Do you like coffee?

Jasper · Accepted Answer

I like accurate questions, expecially if they've been written with math symbols (π ∑ α · ∫ ±√ etc..) instead of "square root of x cube -2" when they mean to say √(x³-2).
I like when people show in their questions that they at least tried to reach the solution instead of coming here hoping someone else would do their homeworks.
I like when questions are composed by 1 or 2 problems or blocks. Rather than expecting people to work for more than 10 minutes on their answer. 
When I see more than 2-3 blocks in a single question, even if I can easily solve a couple of them, I wouldn't solve any of them, I would just skip if the third one took too much time...

and yes, as italian, I love coffee

Sun · Answer

I love to answer math questions because I can practice my math skills and exercise my brain. If I see some interesting questions, I copy them down on my notebook and solve them for fun. I mean, it's all about math and that's all I want. Yes, I love coffee. I drink it since I was in second grade. I'm not lying.

lopilato · Answer

Yea and for me it looks on non-math questions too bcs I use msn language commonly too. And it takes clear of ur trust. Lol, I obtained that punctation blunders whilst I wrote this reaction.

Anonymous · Answer

I, try  they are maths questions easily soluation.

Trending News

When do you answer people's maths questions?

4 Answers