Questions in Lectures
A Beginners Guide
Over my many, many years at both university and school, I have noticed that questions need to be asked. Clarifications, if you will, of the content being described by the lecturer (or in school’s case, teacher). However, often these questions just make the asker look utterly stupid. The skill is to remain cool in appearance and yet learn information, as this pamphlet will show, the best result is simply not to ask and wait for someone else to.
For example, in one of my lectures, a rather boofy geeky type asked a question about logic which clearly showed that he wasn’t listening. It went something like this:
Lecturer: So the simple way to prove that all crows are black is to find all crows in existence and show all of them are black, or alternatively to find all non-black items and show that none of them are crows.
Questioner: But aren’t you taking the problem to another level and ignoring the fundamental properties of the crow? (Or something like that)
As the question was carefully phrased, it seems that this was an attempt to seem deep and learned. It resulted in him looking very stupid, although he was clearly so stupid he didn’t realise this, and five seconds later did a not-so-sneaky peek to see if he had any ardent admirers. He didn’t.
Unfortunately, there are far worse than these. I have three question askers in my engineering class. Of these, the worst is known as The Boofy-Haired Dickhead. His special ability is to repeatedly ask the same question over and over again if the answer isn’t exactly what he wants. This can happen during lectures or afterwards. If it happens during lectures most lecturers will try to gently let him down, whilst the rest of the class wants him dead. There are the rare and very pleasurable moments though when a lecturer finally caves and tells him where to go. After class, he can be seen hurtling towards a clearly dreading lecturer to ask the same question again. Clearly he has not studied the subtle art of question asking and we can safely conclude that he will never understand anything.
There is an advantage to not asking questions. If you don’t ask duiring class, you can always e-mail. Thus, if you are asking something redundant, you are safe from ridicule, whilst, if you ask something sensible, your name will be in the glory of a mail forwarded to the rest of the class, you can’t lose!
And finally, there is also the ability for entertainment. If a lecturer makes a glaring mistake whilst writing something down, many minutes of subtle laughter at the professors expense can be had whilst he furiously tries to figure out where he has gone wrong. So, don’t correct him, enjoy the moment of your lecturer stumbling about his own work. After all, he probably laughs at your exam write-up.