As a teacher, I feel as though I need to clarify the age-old idea of "there are no stupid questions".
My response to this? It's B.S. Why do I think that? Let me tell you (in a round-about way that comes back to the question later...
Students can be lazy. No, not all students, and no, not all the time. But quite often, they're lazy. They want the teacher to do the work FOR them. They want to sit back and "learn" everything through some miraculous form of osmosis I've never encountered... it's like they'd be a great audience for that sort of hypnotic-like sleep learning where you play a CD with information on it while you sleep and when you awake... EUREKA! Brains!
I got in an argument with a student a few months ago about something similar. Yes, I realize that, as the adult in the situation, I should not argue with students. However, she insisted. She was upset that I was unfairly negative to her in class, and that I was always telling her that she was wrong. There was a long history of encounters behind this, but this was definitely one of them. And the thing is: I didn't deny it.
The reason I didn't deny it was because she was CONSTANTLY wrong. Or, at least off-topic. And I'm not the type of person to say that it might be her interpretation and that's fine, but I was looking for something else... I'm a bit more blunt as I want them to understand that it was a myth to believe that anything can be interpreted in any way and, in reality, there are a finite number of ways we can interpret literature. She didn't really appreciate this academic perspective and simply thought I was being "mean".
I'd ask a question about a topic and she'd put up her hand. When I called on her for a response, she'd often get away from the textual discussion at hand and dive into a personal tirade on what she believed. Now, I'm all for having beliefs... but they have their place, and the academic environment of literary analysis isn't it.
An example would go as follows: I begin to make a point that physical descriptions of characters in stories DO NOT dictate WHO the characters are or necessarily what they are like. Just because the character has blonde hair does not mean that the character has any characteristics that only blondes hold (Disclaimer: I'm very aware that some authors do, in fact, utilize physical descriptions in order to develop a certain facet of a personality. William Golding does this shamelessly in Lord of the Flies). However, I wanted to make the point that when we discuss character in a story, the physical description is generally meaningless unless the author intentionally connects the two. In essence, it was a discussion about stereotyping and unfair assumptions being made without evidence to support it, which is a much more universal lesson than they realize... we, as readers must rely on evidence from three main sources: what the character says, how the character acts, and what the other characters (or the narrator) say about the character in question.
I connected this to our real lives... I made a comment that, "Just because Joe-Blow dyes his hair doesn't mean I can assume anything about his personlity. I could, but I would be working on stereotypical assumptions. This is the same as saying this: Bobby-Lou has blonde hair so she must be unintelligent." So, my little friend put up her hand and said, "If you knew Joe-Blow, you'd know that the dye-job DOES say something about him." I conceded the fact that this was wholly possible, just like blonde girls can be unintelligent and skinny guys with glasses can be interested in Friday nights spent working out mathematical equations. I explained, though, that in literary analysis we cannot assume this and we MUST focus on evidence from the text. The same goes for life.
Did she just let it go? Nope. She kept on going. She explained that she could tell things about people by the way they dressed. I explained to her that she was starting to get away from the point and the whole problem with stereotypes is that they're often inaccurate or completely untrue. Did this deter her? Not a chance. She kept going, trying to convince me that everyone is limited to how they dress in her mind, so she should be able to talk about it in her paragraph. Just to be able to move on, I pointed out that the fact that she was simply wrong because it was a superficial assumption and she simply couldn't do so, especially in a liteary response. Her response? She got upset and started making rude comments about me to her friend.
There was also an essay written about a moral dilemma... we'd talked about moral dilemmas in a short story and then I gave them a news article, asking them if the man in the article SHOULD have received a reduced sentence in jail for carrying out a mercy killing on his daughter who suffered from cerebral palsy, constant pain, and had the developmental capacity of a three-month old (she was 12). In her essay, she made countless errors in various areas, and ended off by saying, "I know [the daughter] would have been sad to see her dad go to jail. And I know that God would have forgiven him, so why can't the government?" I explained that these personal assumptions were fine to hold in her own worldview, but their overtly personal and unfounded nature had no place in a formal persuasive essay. Her response? I was unfair and she could believe that if she wanted. Again, there was a complete disconnect between what the expectation of the assignment was and my explanation of instructions, and what she wanted to say and believe. This was only one episode out of many (so don't assume that I overreacted in one isolated situation), and although I could've borne a single confrontation, repeated challenges of this sort without a sincere interest in actually improving and understanding the perspective of the other person deflate me to the point where I find that I lose all patience in the matter.
It got me thinking about a lot of things, and frustrated me to no end. It made me realize that some kids don't want to learn or understand or improve their skills... they simply want someone to take their word for it... they don't understand that without an interest in understanding and learning from their mistakes (and they do, in fact, make many mistakes), they just won't improve and succeed.
This brings me the long way around to the quote I put up on the board in my room (I have a whiteboard behind my desk that I fill up with quotes about various things from famous people)...
"Some say that there are no stupid questions, but we must be quick to see the flaw in such reasoning... unless the question is asked with a sincere interest in the pursuit of truth and knowledge, all questions find futility."
I didn't attribute the quote to anyone, which surprisingly made the words garner more interest than most of my other quotes. A few students asked who said it... I simply responded with the question of, "what do you think?" Most said they liked it, and only then did I attribute the saying to someone... me (yes... this is a shameless celebration of my nugget of wisdom. Just passing it on)
:)
T
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