In junior high, I had a teacher who used to say that there's no such thing as a dumb question-- and then a kid in my class asked a dumb question. For most of my life, I've believed the contrapositive: that there's no such thing as a smart question. All through grade school, there were always one or two kids whose hands never seemed to go down. They thought that if they could stall the teacher enough with their shallow inquiries, we could never finish the lesson and therefore never get tested. It did actually work on occasion. Since then, I've always associated asking questions with an aversion to learning.
But in class the other day, the professor said something that hit home. It was something along the lines of, "You kids know how to come up with answers to exam questions, but you don't know how to ask questions. If you don't ask the right questions, you'll never get the right answer."
Zing. I still think there are far too many stupid questions, but I am growing to appreciate those few good ones.
Sometimes questions are more important than answers. - Nancy Willard
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