I remember back in elementary school, all the teachers would so “there’s no such thing as a stupid question. They even had posters of that on the doors.
Ironically, most of my class (IIRC) never bothered to ask questions or clear up confusion during class. They preferred to ask peers. If they went to ask the teacher during some other time, I wouldn’t know. I was a frequent go-to person for math and science; this covered my other poor grades (social studies, art) via Halo Effect and made me appear “smart”.
I took to Google for Social Studies.
Somewhere between that and now (Junior year) I figured out that nobody actually remembers when someone asks a stupid question in class. Generally, anyway; every now and then there’s something ridiculously funny.
My point being is that if one is truly smart, they most likely appear to be too.
There’s not much Utility in only seeming smart, anyways.
I’ve always thought that that was a bad way of framing that advice. Of course there’s such a thing as a stupid question! “But isn’t two plus two five?”: stupid question. What kids need to understand instead is that stupid questions are the ones that most greatly need to be asked! That’s how you fix the stupid!
Asking the teacher after class is an acceptable face-saving alternative to speaking out in front of everybody, but in the long run it may not be necessary. I suspect I’m not the only one who remembers “that guy who always asked stupid questions in our engineering classes” but mostly what I remember about him a decade later is that he kept acing those classes too: it turned out that nobody understood all the material; he was just the only one who was really dedicated to fixing his misunderstandings before getting tested on them.
The thing that struck me about “stupid” questions was that my high school chemistry class had a student who kept asking questions that I didn’t quite have the nerve to raise. The teacher was also very solid (he didn’t ask us to memorize atomic weights because he thought it was a waste of time, and, while he wasn’t flashy, he went through the material very efficiently), but I think it was the student who asked the questions contributed to extraordinary scores for the class on the subject-based SAT.
The highest possible score was 800. The class had about 28 students. 6 of them got 800s. I was one of the 2 who got 795.
I remember back in elementary school, all the teachers would so “there’s no such thing as a stupid question. They even had posters of that on the doors.
Ironically, most of my class (IIRC) never bothered to ask questions or clear up confusion during class. They preferred to ask peers. If they went to ask the teacher during some other time, I wouldn’t know. I was a frequent go-to person for math and science; this covered my other poor grades (social studies, art) via Halo Effect and made me appear “smart”.
I took to Google for Social Studies.
Somewhere between that and now (Junior year) I figured out that nobody actually remembers when someone asks a stupid question in class. Generally, anyway; every now and then there’s something ridiculously funny.
My point being is that if one is truly smart, they most likely appear to be too.
There’s not much Utility in only seeming smart, anyways.
I’ve always thought that that was a bad way of framing that advice. Of course there’s such a thing as a stupid question! “But isn’t two plus two five?”: stupid question. What kids need to understand instead is that stupid questions are the ones that most greatly need to be asked! That’s how you fix the stupid!
Asking the teacher after class is an acceptable face-saving alternative to speaking out in front of everybody, but in the long run it may not be necessary. I suspect I’m not the only one who remembers “that guy who always asked stupid questions in our engineering classes” but mostly what I remember about him a decade later is that he kept acing those classes too: it turned out that nobody understood all the material; he was just the only one who was really dedicated to fixing his misunderstandings before getting tested on them.
The thing that struck me about “stupid” questions was that my high school chemistry class had a student who kept asking questions that I didn’t quite have the nerve to raise. The teacher was also very solid (he didn’t ask us to memorize atomic weights because he thought it was a waste of time, and, while he wasn’t flashy, he went through the material very efficiently), but I think it was the student who asked the questions contributed to extraordinary scores for the class on the subject-based SAT.
The highest possible score was 800. The class had about 28 students. 6 of them got 800s. I was one of the 2 who got 795.