Reader Kirk writes:
“Is there any such thing as a dumb question?”
I know the standard response to that is… “There is no such thing as a dumb question.”
But I also know from 30 years of teaching that that response comes from the teeth-pulling teachers have to do to get students to ask questions, and I also know… (don’t tell anyone) I got some pretty dumb questions over the years.
So:
Is there any such thing as a dumb question?
If so, examples, please!
(If you have a suggestion for a QOTD/QOTW, feel free to email me. Responses to this QOTW sent by email will be ignored; please post your responses here.)
What is air?
I would disagree that this is a dumb question, especially if asked by a child. Air being a concept we all use but rarely talk about, it would be a curious and intelligent question for a child to ask.
It is easy to spot a dumb question if you are dumb yourself, but the more you know of the universe, the more you know there are no dumb questions. “What is air” is not a dumb question.
What is love? So baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me no more. Most questions aren’t dumb, including that one. The questions that are dumb are the ones that are meant to annoy. Including the classic Are We There Yet?
Well, are we there yet?
I often hear at work around the kettle: where have all the biscuits gone?
What answer are they waiting for? They’ve been kidnapped by aliens? The black hole that swallows our pens and staplers has taken them too? Tiny elves have borrowed them to use as cartwheels?
you misunderstood the context of my question:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=What%20is%20air%3F
Oh, it’s some hilarious internet thing. I always trip over those.
I like Bruce Coville’s way of putting it: No question is stupid if you really want to know the answer. The only questions that annoy me as a teacher is when students ask repetitive or obvious questions just to distract you. If they’re genuinely curious, I’m always happy. For adults, the same rule applies, with the understanding that I’m not your source of knowledge. If you’re asking me a question you could figure out for yourself, I think you’re just lazy. Like “where are the jobs, Mr. President?” A little research could show unemployment has improved, but you don’t want to actually know the answer, you just want to grandstand, so I think your question is stupid.
I had a customer at work ask a dumb question yesterday. Our lights are on timers, I guess, so when it’s closing time, half the lights in the store turn off, to give customers the hint to GTFO. (As if the manager announcing it over the intercom wasn’t enough.) Last night, not 30 seconds after the lights turned off (but before the manager announced closing time), a customer asked what time we closed. I said, “We’re closed now; that’s why the lights turned off.”
I think a dumb question also could be one where you’ve asked one thing, but you obviously mean something else. I get this all the time at work. I’m bagging their items, and they say, “Oh, can I have a bag?” I pause and look at the bag their stuff is in, wondering it’s suddenly turned itself into a box or something. Or they ask, “Can I have a handle bag?” As I’m handing them their bag BY ITS HANDLES. What they mean is, “Can I have a *paper* bag?”
Also, I hate questions like “What are you reading?” when the title is right in front of their face.
While quite normal, and not exactly dumb, there is the asking questions of things that can’t answer you back. Like your pets. Or your lost keys. I used to have a deaf cat, and I would talk to her, then say to myself, “What am I doing? She can’t hear me! …she couldn’t understand me if she could hear me anyway.”
“Why do gay people need to be ‘married?”
because of the financial, legal and emotional benefits associated with marriage in our cultural hegemony.
“Do you work here?”
Bonus stupidity if there is a uniform
I get that question all the time, but I’ve never got it while in a place where I actually work.
After five years of tech support, I can confirm that there are in fact dumb questions, but most of them only become really dumb when paired with the preceding statements. Some examples:
It says “Name” in the first field. What should I type here?
I’ve finished filling everything out. Should I click Next?
I can’t connect to the internet. The power’s out. Is that a problem?
Did that for a long time myself, unfortunately I never thought the questions were dumb, rather, the expectations that people had over technology was completely unrealistic. The kind of “dumb” you are talking about comes from fear, and nothing makes you stupid quite as fast as fear.
I try not to think of the dumb questions as dumb in tech support. We’re dealing with people who are uncomfortable with the current technology and are terrified of doing something wrong / damaging. Patience is the watchword: teaching them comfort with the tech our mission objective.
The famous Disney question- “What time is the 3 o’clock parade?”
Well sometimes the parade’s held at 4 whenever there’s a afternoon thundershower so…
One of my former supervisors said there was no such thing as a dumb question, provided you don’t ask the same question every time. And that it was often betterto ask a “dumb” question and risk seeming stupid than to act upon an erroneous assumption and remove all doubt.
No, there is no such thing as a dumb question, some people are dumb and they have questions.
Like all great issues in life, this one was covered by XKCD:
http://xkcd.com/1053/
“Empire Records, open until midnight!” (person on phone asks a dumb question) “MIDNIGHT!”
A question asked by a normally functioning teen/adult without regard for the qualifications of the person or people being asked is typically a dumb a question as is any question that is not preceded and/or followed by an honest effort to locate. determine, and/or evaluate a satisfactory answer.
The content of a question is not dumb on its own – as many have said below, the degree of dumbness is context sensitive. Dumb questions are asked by those who are not only too lazy to try and find the answer themselves but also too lazy to locate the person or people most likely to provide a valuable answer and too lazy to evaluate the quality of an answer after it is received.
Five examples of this common to teachers are:
1) In algebra, a student asking if they got the correct value for x instead of plugging their obtained value back into the original equation and checking on their own.
2) In physics, a student obtains an answer such as the speed of a thrown football being 5000 m/s (traveling roughly the length of 50 football fields every second) and asks whether or not it is correct before evaluating whether the answer makes sense.
3) In English, a question is presented as a prompt for an essay, and a student immediately googles the question, trusting (and typically plagiarizing) the answers of an anonymous and largely unqualified group of complete strangers before considering their own thoughts and feelings (interestingly, the “average” answer of a large group of uninformed strangers is often valuable, but that’s another discussion).
4) In History, a student asks a factual question on the internet, when in less than ten seconds, they could locate the answer themselves.
5) In Political Science, a student regurgitates the talking points and statistics of their own political party/circle without any basic fact checking or even a cursory evaluation of the opposing perspectives and arguments.
Dumb questions are forgivable coming from children and from teens (at a much lower frequency); however, adults who ask nothing but dumb questions are lazy thinkers – people who would rather shop for answers than work for them. Our society (and sadly much of our public school system) intentionally teaches us to adopt this mindset so that shallow, specious, quick-fix political and economic solutions are easy sells.
It was frightening to see how intellectually lazy my honors and AP students were at the start of the year (and sometimes at the end too although I converted as many as I could) – I had the most fun teaching the low level “regular” students who were just as bright and willing to call bullshit when something didn’t correspond with common sense or personal experience.
Full disclosure – I work in a bookstore
“Is this a bookstore?”
“Is this a library?”
“Are your books organized by author or title?”
[Customer facing wall of lefty and feminist bumper stickers, political tee shirts and anti-nuclear posters, face outs of ‘Too Big To Fail’ and Maddow’s ‘Drift’] – “Do you carry Bill O’Reilly?”
[asked in January] “Is there snow in Vermont?”
“Do you carry any books on Urine Therapy?”
[Very Offended Customer – she made a point of telling me how offended she was. Repeatedly.] “You mean you don’t carry any Bibles? I just find that so offensive, I mean, not even one?” [Dear customer- FUCK YOU]
And one I overheard in Poundland “How much does this cost?”
Any question the asker hasn’t at least tried to answer him/herself before asking. Just think for a second, often the answer will be obvious.
YES! I have a friend who does that CONSTANTLY. I mean seriously, do you KNOW about the Google?
I’ve always found it dumb when writers are asked (usually by people who want to, themselves, *be* writers), “Where do you get your ideas from?” Makes me want the snappy answer to be, “The idea fairy brings them, kid.”
I do think a question can be a dumb one if it’s been asked over & over & over again by someone who is resistant to learning. I don’t mind answering the question, “How do I download an attachment someone sent me in one of my emails?” the first one, two, three times, but I’m really getting annoyed at this point because nobody seems to want to retain the answer!