Unsolicited advice to my fellow math answerers?

Hi KK. Good to see you back.

I'm going to start with the second one first. Sometimes I hardly know what to answer other than to refer them to Wolfram. Solving a cubic or quartic the long way is a nasty piece of work and I don't know what they are really after. If they want it solved the long way and it does not break down using elementary methods, I don't know what else to do but send them to Wolfram. I don't have a clue what else can be done. One could spend a far too long on some of these problems and I would like to move on.

Rudeness is absolutely pandemic on this board and those of us in the hard core sciences are almost helpless to defend ourselves. I have reported rudeness anytime I see it, especially if I suspect the asker is very young. The problem is that yahoo! answers does not really take action unless 2 maybe 3 or 4 (I don't know how many reports it takes) report the same offender. Perhaps that makes sense in a place like religion where there are many readers, but it does not make sense in our area. I think anybody over level 4 or 5 certainly knows rudeness when they see it, and we do not report things lightly. We should be listened to.

I have only committed the error of rudeness once and regretted it immediately and edited my answer to reflect it. Sometimes the simplest answers require the most work because you know you have to put in terms that a student can understand. That's what teaching is all about.

Take care.

Yes, answering math questions should be viewed as an opportunity to teach. That's why it is also important to not just give an answer. Explaining the process used to get the answer is much more important.