Can’t Answer A Student’s Question?
You might be being stupid productively
Human beings are not perfect.
No individual possesses knowledge of all domains.
The same is true for teachers.
Nearly every teacher has experienced or will experience it at some time or other: you receive a tricky or unexpected question from a student which you cannot instantly answer.
This then leads to the dawning emptiness and fear of not being taken seriously by the students and their peers, and not being seen as the ideal teacher and an ocean of knowledge.
In this scenario, it’s not as bad as it looks. Feeling stupidity is part of any teaching and research profession — there’s a lot of smart people out there and we don’t always feel one of them.
To clarify this proposition, we must begin with a little background.
The Importance of Stupidity
In a little-known essay in the “Journal of Cell Sciences”, Martin Schwartz wrote on “The Importance of Stupidity.”
His crucial insight from graduate studies was this:
“That the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite.”
Doing science made him feel stupid.
With every discovery and quest for new opportunities that feeling is a constant companion. Upon realising this, the only way to escape the dilemma is to “muddle through as best we can.”
As Schwartz noted, it’s the mindset that makes the difference.
Firstly, we should raise as many questions and do as many experiments as possible until we eventually reach a provisional answer. This is a constant quest for knowledge acquisition. Curiosity is the essence of life.
Secondly, we can teach our students how to be ‘productively stupid’ like this. It is not the feeling of actually being stupid, but the attitude of being ignorant by choice, to focus on the questions of paramount importance, and to always be trying hard again and again, even if we keep getting it wrong in the end. With trial and error, we learn always something new every time and with each step.
Thirdly, students must be aware of their weaknesses and their not-knowing ‘partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student’s knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.’ Actually, this insight is not new — it’s the Socratic Method. It should be inculcated in their minds that they should acquire maximum knowledge, but that doesn’t mean that they should feel inferior if they are less aware than others.
In other words, being ‘productively stupid’ helps both students and teachers to increase deep learning and, in the end, it helps them explore the unknown with a natural inquisitiveness that will benefit them.
The Solution Lies Within You
So, what can you do when you can’t answer a student’s question? Here are some ideas:
- Do not be afraid of ‘looking stupid’, but be honest: Students won’t think that you are not qualified enough if you can’t answer a question. Just say that you don’t have an answer right now but that you will find it and tell them next time. You can always answer the question in the next class after some research.
- Teachers need to demonstrate that they are learners and can be productively stupid too: If you are asked about a field in which you are not an expert, a normal response would be: ‘Well, this is a good question, but I don‘t know the answer just yet, shall we try and find it?’ Show your students that you are interested in finding the answer together with them. Use your rhetorical skills and redirect the question to the other students and make a learning exercise out of it.
- Try to model stupidity: Search the web or other resources, find a relevant article, refer to methods of further investigation by selecting keywords, quoting resources, or using other previously successful strategies. Hopefully, this exercise leads to an answer, but even more interesting is that new and other questions may arise during your search. Show your students how your research works. One question leads to another and more well-informed questions. Modelling stupidity helps to acquire new knowledge.
- Visualise the problem: Another important thing is to put the question on the whiteboard and collect together with the students all the information necessary so as to comprehend the meaning.
You might be being stupid productively
We can all hear that voice in our ears when we receive a question which we can’t answer immediately, but you don’t have to listen to it and should trust yourself. Try to think of the importance of stupidity for any research and teaching and muddle through as best you can:
A teacher’s biggest fear can be their best companion.
Stupidity shouldn’t be considered the weakness of the mind.
Stupidity can be considered a dying phoenix that can be reborn from its ashes. It can be made productive by different strategies and by making it even more productive.
If you find this post interesting, please leave a comment below.
References:
- Schwartz, M. A. (2008). The importance of stupidity in scientific research. Journal of Cell Science, 121(11), 1771. Retrieved from http://jcs.biologists.org/content/121/11/1771.abstract [20/08/2020].
- Socratic Method. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method [20/08/2020].
