> It’s also acceptable, when listening to a seminar, to ask “dumb” but constructive questions to help clarify some basic issue in the talk. I think this is one

> It’s also acceptable, when listening to a seminar, to ask “dumb” but constructive questions to help clarify some basic issue in the talk. I think this is one of the reasons I hit a wall in my study of mathematics forty-five years ago. In the master's program I was enrolled in, the students never asked questions during class. The teachers would probably have welcomed questions, but the culture among the graduate students was never to show ignorance by asking. The result was that I often got lost in the lectures, was unable to catch up by studying the material on my own outside of class, and never became a mathematician.