My brother Peter was an experienced, respected math teacher. He loved math and he loved teaching. I was thinking about one thing Peter did extensively, (mostly, presumably, off-the-clock), which was of enormous help to struggling students.

Peter would "red-line" the homework and test papers to such a degree, that if the student showed their work, then Peter would be able to find the point at which the student's thinking and answer diverged from the nominal answer, and show the correct formulation and number-crunching to get the expected answer. Anybody can get the right answer, but did they actually understand how the question was asked and how the answer relates to choosing (and understanding) the correct way to think about how to set up the math problem and crunch out the correct answer?

I am sure there are teachers all over the nation (world?) who struggle with the enormous amount of time they could or should spend on each student's homework and tests, showing them the correct thought process to get to the right answer, not simply checking off that the answer was either right or wrong. Most of those dedicated teachers are not paid for a lot of the work of "correcting", and since they aren't paid for it, only the most dedicated actually do much of it. Most simply look for "the right answer". Check. You're a good student. Uh-oh. You're not. Almost binary.

So it came to me that if the teacher had a way to upload scans of the papers, homework or test, into a website database, (numbered, perhaps, for anonymity), which anyone (authorized?) could "correct", using "Peter's Criteria For Correcting Papers", that both teachers and students around the world would benefit.

Perhaps "trusted participants", who have demonstrated they know the material, could then relieve the teacher of some of this time-consuming activity. Seems to me there's a huge underutilized older population in America who might benefit from interacting and helping the next generation.

Would this be feasible for a community? I think that it would result in some cases of parents correcting their own kid's answers, (but they wouldn't know this, unless the code or number of the student were known), or even the more advanced students in the class given extra credit for "correcting" the other student's answers online (anonymously); each case in the same meticulous way Peter did, looking for not just the right answer, but the underlying way the problem was thought out. Was the right formula used correctly and the student simply made an arithmetical mistake, but understood the principles and foundations to get the right answer?

All of this may be currently in use in some communities, and I'm unaware of it. Great! I'd appreciate getting a link, and maybe I'll correct a few papers for grade-school arithmetic and work myself back up to my college-level of so many years ago. I absolutely loved algebra, geometry, functions. (I passed calculus, but I doubt I could solve a problem today with the book in front of me!)

Check out the payback for the volunteers! They get to renew and review their own mathematical foundations and skills, and to keep learning! They also get the satisfaction that they are helping the teachers and the students.

But if this idea is not currently in use, I give the idea to anyone out there for development. An idea for an "app"?

Maybe today's computers could even meet "Peter's Criteria For Correcting Papers". Now that would be some Turing Test, wouldn't it?