CPM Homework Help Tips (From Tutors)

There are many troubles that college preparatory math course, CPM for short, bring in high school. In my class, CPM was introduced quite late, so my classmates and I used to complete some parts of classwork and home and craved for any help. We survived, but no one of us liked it.

After working with nerds, I found that many issues I suffered could be easily avoided, and the math program can be beneficial. Here come lessons I learned from doing homework quickly and without troubles.

Never Do CPM Homework Alone

Unlike other programs, CPM homework is designed to be done in groups — as well as any other CPM activities. Teachers often insist that individual assignments should be done alone and without any assistance, but it is not a case of preparatory course. Its creators heavily focus on teamwork and expect that students will use social resources at home too, so it is not cheating.

What kind of cooperation is best for CPM? In my experience, several best options are available to anyone.

• Classmates — as far as you share same tasks, it is fair that you will resolve them together. The favorite method of college preparatory math is brainstorming, so grab some drinks, big sheet of paper and solve tasks together.
• Parents, friends & siblings — they are likely to have a different knowledge from yours. It is great for scaffolding-based CPM purpose, which favors creativeness and unique approaches.
• Internet — you may find various materials on the web, and even whole communities where people get CPM homework help. For instance, there is Matheducation sub-reddit where teachers and students interact.

Teacher is the Best CPM Helper

You must not hesitate to contact your teachers for help with homework. When I was attending CPM, we often failed to elaborate all classwork together and had to complete it partially at home. Sometimes it took hours to finish it, and our grades were falling.

Years later, I had an informal talk with my teacher, and it appeared that she was surprised that no one of my classmates had ever contacted her for help with CPM homework!

Tutors are also living human beings, and they often fail to squeeze all planned activities into class schedule. However, they will be glad to help you and your groupmates out of the class if your collective efforts are not productive.

Preserve CPM eBooks and Textbooks

You should find and keep previous volumes of CPM to get help with homework. The method of studying mathematics implies spiral approach. It means that you should learn basics first, and then move to more advanced tasks. Thus, if you cannot solve some tasks, it may appear that you just miss previous “bricks” to your math foundation.

I’ve found out that things needed to deal with homework may be found many chapters away, which it true for both CPM in geometry and algebra. That is why it is always worth downloading your ebooks and keeping textbooks on hands.

Use Online Scaffolding

CPM has official online tools that are intended to aid you with homework. Official CPM Help Center has clues for each task you may have to resolve at home. It is not an answer key — instead, they are hints and tricks. They are best to help your brainstorming when you collaborate with your classmates or online.

Many students claim that answer keys to homework tasks would be useful, but I had many troubles with them. If you look for an answer key, be sure to check following pitfalls.

• CPM textbooks have different editions, and tasks in them may vary. Answer keys online are often based on outdated versions, so may look relevant but remain incorrect.
• “Peoples’” answer key, which are manually made by communities on the Internet, are often incorrect. They are usually made by other students, who might have made mistakes.
• Answer keys are often incomplete. I used to spend hours looking for pages I needed and often failed to retrieve required ones.

Bear Grylls Approach to CPM

However fun it sounds, I recommend approaching college preparatory homework as a survival game. Bear Grylls struggles with wild nature using tools that he is allowed having. Similarly, you are expected to get college math help with only those material you have learned. Thus, it is entirely OK to use any non-cheating methods like cooperation, official clues and past volumes of textbooks to survive in the world of mathematics.

Moreover, never rely on answer keys! Using prepared answers in homework is like Bear Grylls who orders pizza in the midst of the desert — it is unfair, and it may come to you already spoiled and poisonous. You must make mistakes because mistakes empower your learning.

I keep a keen eye on the development of CPM, but I can hardly embrace all school. What issues with homework did you have? Share it in comments so that the community could come up with pieces of advice!