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There are absolutely dumb questions. Such as sitting in class not paying attention and asking the teacher a question where the answer was mentioned 30seconds be

by iinnPP 3y ago

There are absolutely dumb questions. Such as sitting in class not paying attention and asking the teacher a question where the answer was mentioned 30seconds beforehand. 100+ times in a semester. When said teacher has three of these students, the rest of the class suffers.

2devnull 3y ago
It’s all relative. In a class full of high iq (>150) people, many questions would be seen as dumb that wouldn’t be seen as dumb by a class full of people with learning disabilities. The spectrum is wide. Everything alas is dumb. Never assume you’re the smartest person in the room.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  There is no classroom full of students 3+ standard deviations above the norm. (15 is a standard deviation. 145 is 3 standard deviations). And if there were, the reasons stupid questions would be asked is because kid#11 was not paying attention and nothing to do with their intelligence. Which happens plenty of times with average students. These are subjects a decidedly average person can understand with effort and study. But if distracted by well... Life... Things happen. ---------- No joke, one of the smartest people I know was distracted in class because he won Jeopardy and the NDA / don't tell anybody was kinda stressing him out. That kinda thing. Life finds a way to distract us, even the smartest of us.
  - golergka 3y ago
    > There is no classroom full of students 3+ standard deviations above the norm. May be 145 is unrealistic, but 130 is not. It's only 1 in 44, which should be a pretty realistic figure. My own high school had a similar ratio of admission.
  - 2devnull 3y ago
    “was not paying attention and nothing to do with their intelligence” You might be surprised to learn that people with an iq of 80 have a hard time paying attention to much of anything. My point was not to quibble over the likelihood of a classroom of 150’s, but to illustrate a point, that what counts as a dumb question is largely a function of the average cognitive capacity of the reference group. You may disagree and find context doesn’t matter, and to some extent I can see where you are coming from: mistakes like not paying attention seem to be results of a slightly different thing than pure g intelligence. I see that, but suspect the correlation is so high that the distinction matters only a little.
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      > My point was not to quibble over the likelihood of a classroom of 150’s, but to illustrate a point, that what counts as a dumb question is largely a function of the average cognitive capacity of the reference group. And in my experience, a "dumb question" is asked all the time by highly smart people who happened to have lost their attention span at that moment. > I see that, but suspect the correlation is so high that the distinction matters only a little. I was a very distracted student growing up. I made it a point to ask stupid questions, because it was more important to hold the class back and make sure I got my learning, than to otherwise pretend I was smarter than who I really was. I get that teachers got pissed off at me for not paying attention. I also get that I was holding back the class. But alas, the name of the game is learning. You can't learn if you've missed the material. If you've missed the material, better ask the question right now (while you still remember), than wait later in the week when you've really forgotten everything.
      - 2devnull 3y ago
        When I used to hear people ask those kinds of questions I just assumed they had learning disabilities of some sort. I never really felt “held back” by other students as much as by the curriculum or by ability grouping or the large class sizes.
        dragontamer 3y ago
        I mean, I know this other guy who absolutely was mentally handicapped in my Calculus class. He obviously could do calculus, but we all had to be careful how we talked and interacted, because his ability outside of math was almost nil. Must have been one of those 'idiot-savants' or something.
rileymat2 3y ago
I am not sure that this is true, if they are asking about some of the harder concepts even if someone thought they understood it at the time, repetition is key to learning. Repeating some of the harder things may make the rest of the students in the class better.
6510 3y ago
This is why you can rewind video. What is the excuse for the desire for it to be like a theater play with the same actor/teacher reading the same script every year? The irony is that it is the system that is stubborn, unable to learn from its mistakes, unable to just try things and fail, unable to comprehend why and when it fails. When subjected to school I think I could have listed thousands of components of the formula that do not compute. Now I know the most significant and most outlandish mistakes are reasonably documented by sufficiently credible people. There are lots of much less obvious but hilarious and spectacular ideas and experiments. A guy making a quality children TV program here said that teachers should have the highest salaries. Our smartest people should want to become teachers one day, as the ultimate career goal.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  Indeed. I think the most cost, effective, and resource-efficient pedagogical method for undergrad would be {best video} + {played in a lecture all} + {with a TA breaking the video into chunks and asking for questions} + {TA session with smaller groups}. Redoing 90% of the same lecture yearly, by faculty whose time could better be spent researching, is insane. But any change in teaching upsets a lot of academia economics, which are tenuous as-is. I expect it'd take a federal mandate to make the above shift (a la ACA and electronic health records).

by iinnPP 3y ago

2devnull 3y ago

It’s all relative. In a class full of high iq (>150) people, many questions would be seen as dumb that wouldn’t be seen as dumb by a class full of people with learning disabilities. The spectrum is wide. Everything alas is dumb. Never assume you’re the smartest person in the room.

dragontamer 3y ago
There is no classroom full of students 3+ standard deviations above the norm. (15 is a standard deviation. 145 is 3 standard deviations). And if there were, the reasons stupid questions would be asked is because kid#11 was not paying attention and nothing to do with their intelligence. Which happens plenty of times with average students. These are subjects a decidedly average person can understand with effort and study. But if distracted by well... Life... Things happen. ---------- No joke, one of the smartest people I know was distracted in class because he won Jeopardy and the NDA / don't tell anybody was kinda stressing him out. That kinda thing. Life finds a way to distract us, even the smartest of us.
- golergka 3y ago
  > There is no classroom full of students 3+ standard deviations above the norm. May be 145 is unrealistic, but 130 is not. It's only 1 in 44, which should be a pretty realistic figure. My own high school had a similar ratio of admission.
- 2devnull 3y ago
  “was not paying attention and nothing to do with their intelligence” You might be surprised to learn that people with an iq of 80 have a hard time paying attention to much of anything. My point was not to quibble over the likelihood of a classroom of 150’s, but to illustrate a point, that what counts as a dumb question is largely a function of the average cognitive capacity of the reference group. You may disagree and find context doesn’t matter, and to some extent I can see where you are coming from: mistakes like not paying attention seem to be results of a slightly different thing than pure g intelligence. I see that, but suspect the correlation is so high that the distinction matters only a little.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    > My point was not to quibble over the likelihood of a classroom of 150’s, but to illustrate a point, that what counts as a dumb question is largely a function of the average cognitive capacity of the reference group. And in my experience, a "dumb question" is asked all the time by highly smart people who happened to have lost their attention span at that moment. > I see that, but suspect the correlation is so high that the distinction matters only a little. I was a very distracted student growing up. I made it a point to ask stupid questions, because it was more important to hold the class back and make sure I got my learning, than to otherwise pretend I was smarter than who I really was. I get that teachers got pissed off at me for not paying attention. I also get that I was holding back the class. But alas, the name of the game is learning. You can't learn if you've missed the material. If you've missed the material, better ask the question right now (while you still remember), than wait later in the week when you've really forgotten everything.
    - 2devnull 3y ago
      When I used to hear people ask those kinds of questions I just assumed they had learning disabilities of some sort. I never really felt “held back” by other students as much as by the curriculum or by ability grouping or the large class sizes.
      - dragontamer 3y ago
        I mean, I know this other guy who absolutely was mentally handicapped in my Calculus class. He obviously could do calculus, but we all had to be careful how we talked and interacted, because his ability outside of math was almost nil. Must have been one of those 'idiot-savants' or something.

rileymat2 3y ago

I am not sure that this is true, if they are asking about some of the harder concepts even if someone thought they understood it at the time, repetition is key to learning. Repeating some of the harder things may make the rest of the students in the class better.

6510 3y ago

This is why you can rewind video. What is the excuse for the desire for it to be like a theater play with the same actor/teacher reading the same script every year? The irony is that it is the system that is stubborn, unable to learn from its mistakes, unable to just try things and fail, unable to comprehend why and when it fails. When subjected to school I think I could have listed thousands of components of the formula that do not compute. Now I know the most significant and most outlandish mistakes are reasonably documented by sufficiently credible people. There are lots of much less obvious but hilarious and spectacular ideas and experiments. A guy making a quality children TV program here said that teachers should have the highest salaries. Our smartest people should want to become teachers one day, as the ultimate career goal.

ethbr0 3y ago
Indeed. I think the most cost, effective, and resource-efficient pedagogical method for undergrad would be {best video} + {played in a lecture all} + {with a TA breaking the video into chunks and asking for questions} + {TA session with smaller groups}. Redoing 90% of the same lecture yearly, by faculty whose time could better be spent researching, is insane. But any change in teaching upsets a lot of academia economics, which are tenuous as-is. I expect it'd take a federal mandate to make the above shift (a la ACA and electronic health records).