April 7, 2006

There Is Such a Thing as a Stupid Question

By MAUREEN DONOHUE-SMITH

Always trying to get my students to participate in class, I find myself regularly exhorting them: "Please feel free to ask questions. There is no such thing as a stupid question." Yet even as I speak, I know I am not being completely honest. In fact, the students and I are all painfully aware that, like beauty, the stupidity of a question is in the eye of the beholder.

Questions aren't asked in a vacuum; their intelligence or stupidity depends on a variety of contextual variables. The

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