'Slip ups' when asking for help

[wworld]

I’m a student in school. Sometimes, when I need help with work, I’ll ask someone for help. But sometimes the person I ask will just give me the answer. Needless to say, I myself feel guilty even when I shouldn’t. And when I finally get to the answer, I feel like I would be cheating when I put down the answer, so I don’t.

Well, it’s finally gotten to the point where I’m asking for your help (and an answer as to whether the problem described is cheating.). Here’s an example from today:

I asked a friend how to find a cube root of something. He told me that I should just memorize the squares of the squares of some numbers and that the cube root I was looking for was six. It’s not the answer, but it is essential to showing my work to get to the answer. At first I thought I should just skip to the next part of the problem… But I need ‘6’ to solve it, too. So after deciding that I’d get two problems wrong, I went to the next. The, in this problem, one of the steps was to cube 6, thus giving me 216. The cube root of 216 is what I’ve been looking for for the past problems. Well, I still feel guilty of going back to answer these questions (on my homework I have right now) because I’m wondering if I would’ve noticed if this whole thing wasn’t on my mind or if my friend didn’t tell me it was six.

I just don’t want to cheat, and will definitely miss two questions on a homework if I should.

 

[Elizium23]

It sounds like you should work on discerning whom you can safely ask for help on your work, and who might be likely to give you the answer outright, so you can avoid asking them. Do not feel guilty about the answers you already have. That is water under the bridge. Concentrate on the future and try to think up a way to separate the sheep from the goats here. Perhaps there are some people who could be convinced to help you if they were made aware that you feel it’s unethical to just give the answers. Don’t be afraid to make your opinion known, and soon you will have the help that you need.

 

[wworld]

I do. This person usually explains the process without giving an answer.

 

[Ashton_Gaskill]

Another option would be to ask for help on a similar, yet not assigned, problem if possible. In most of my math classes, the even numbers were assigned for homework since the odd answers were in the back of the book, with number 1 and 2 being very similar, number 3 and 4 being similar, and so forth. So if you can get help learning the process on a different problem and then apply it yourself to the homework, that may help you as well.

 

[wworld]

I did that, too. I asked him to show me how to find the cube root of 27 (it being three). Well… He saw it and told me the piece I was looking for for my real homework was 6 afterwards…