Stuck on a homework question? Here is what to do

Question seven will not move

You are fine at this subject. Not brilliant, but fine. Homework gets done most nights, and the ones you cannot do you usually work out eventually.

Then tonight. Six questions went in forty minutes. Question seven has taken thirty on its own and the page looks exactly the way it did when you started.

So you read it again. You search a bit of it. You find a version with different numbers and an answer at the bottom, and you copy the shape of it. The sheet gets handed in at 11:20pm and marked correct.

Five weeks later the same idea turns up on a test, with nothing to search, and you find out question seven was never actually done.

Stuck is not one thing

Almost every stuck question is one of four kinds, and each needs a different first move. The forty minutes go on using the wrong move, usually rereading, which only ever fixes one of them.

Question seven was the second kind. The page was still blank after thirty minutes, so nothing had broken. Nothing had started. You could say what the question wanted, you could not say which method it wanted, and no amount of rereading was ever going to hand that over.

The move was to ignore the numbers, find one worked example of that type, cover the solution and try to reach line two. Six minutes, and question seven gets finished by you at ten past ten. Five weeks later you have met it with your own pen.

If you cannot start the homework at all, that is a different problem in the same clothes. The unclear first move is what stops you, not the maths. Shrink it until it is slightly embarrassing: copy out question one by hand, and allow yourself to stop there. You rarely stop there.

Ten minutes, then ask

The first ten minutes are worth more than the next thirty combined. The minutes where you are trying and failing are where most of the learning happens. But struggle has a shelf life, and it runs out earlier than it feels like it does.

Ten minutes means pen moving and lines written. Rereading does not count and neither does staring. When the ten is up, stop and ask. Not after one more read. The question does not get easier and you get worse at it.

If your attention leaves the moment a task stops being obvious, as it often does with ADHD, the cap matters more. A timer you can see turns an open ended wait into something with an end on it.

Ask for the first step, not the answer

An answer finishes the sheet. A first step finishes the topic. A copied answer looks identical to one you understood. To your teacher, to your parents, and worst of all to you.

An unfinished question is a flag. A copied one is a flag you burned.

None of which makes copying it a stupid move. At 11pm, with five more questions and a bag to pack, it is the only move that ends the evening. It is just the one that charges you later.

So the rule is not do not get help. It is do not accept the answer. How you ask decides what you get back, and a good ask is about four words long.

• What type of question is this?
• Give me the first line only
• Which bit of this did I get wrong?
• Why does that step work?
• Do not tell me the answer yet

That last one works on teachers, friends, siblings and chatbots alike. Then show your attempt, especially the wrong one. It tells them where you fell off. A blank page tells them nothing.

Plan2Ace

A pen and someone patient beside you are enough. At 9:40pm, Plan2Ace is the patient one.

Tap Stuck and point the camera at the question. It works it with you: first step first, the mechanism explained, the answer last.

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