chillintoucan28 said:
What is the purpose of this message board? To help people with math problems.
Yes. But "help with a math problem" is quite a different thing from "teaching a semester of material." While the volunteers here can do their best to help a student learn, understand, gain confidence, and succeed through a given homework exercise, that assistance does, I'm afraid, require that the student have at least some basic grasp of the underlying material. It is simply not reasonably feasible to attempt here to provide that foundational underpinning. That's what the hours in the classroom, the explanations from the instructor, and all the pages in those very thick textbooks are for! :wink:
chillintoucan28 said:
It is absolutely no right of yours to judge one's ability to perform math....
But how on earth would a tutor
usefully help a student, if he did not use his experience and depth of knowledge to figure out "where" the student is and what sort of help that student actually needs and can likely understand? :?:
For instance, some exercises can be solved in any of a variety of ways. Should a tutor ignore the fact that a certain student is in algebra and provide a calculus-based explanation? I would respectfully suggest that this might not be the best way to "help" that algebra student. :shock:
To return to the specific issue here: You have elsewhere given ample evidence of needing to bone up on algebra. Your drive to "pre-study" your next course is admirable, and you are to be commended for attempting it. But continuing to try to find just the answers to a few exercises involving topics of which you have little, if any, comprehension, is a great way to cause dissonance later when you actually take a course on the subject. In other words, trying to "backwards engineer" a topic from the worked solutions to a handful of exercises will most-likely lead to the (inadvertent) drawing of invalid conclusions which can easily cause you harm in later studies. :!:
Many here have expressed concern for your success; please do not take this worried care for your well-being and long-term progress as some sort of "attack" on you. Instead, please consider taking this time and your laudable energy and drive, and directing it toward reviewing your algebra. A solid grasp of pre-calculus algebra, in my experience, is probably the best thing one can possess preparation for calculus studies.
My best wishes to you!
Eliz.