Stupid Questions - Yes, There Are

Kids who are not super confident often preface their questions during class with "This might be a stupid question, but. . ."  Many well-meaning teachers respond to that with the line, "There are no stupid questions."  I know that sounds good at the moment, but the problem is that it is simply not true. 

Consider this scene from The Office.  Dwight has gone home to bury his aunt.  While there, he spends some time with his nephew, Cameron, who is being raised in the city and knows nothing of farm life.  He points at a goat and asks if it is a cow. 
Cameron: [after following Dwight to the chicken coop, before sunrise] Is it dangerous to take the eggs in front of them?
Dwight: Yes, very. You really need to stand back because these are killer chickens.
Cameron: I was just asking you something I didn't know.
Dwight: Which is fine. And, you learned something. But, it was kind of a stupid question so you're gonna get made fun of a little bit.

There are absolutely stupid questions.  I've been asked hundreds of them.  When you give instructions and a kid asks what to do, that's a stupid question.  You know it is because other kids look at them with the "Dude, she JUST said that" look.  When a student comes in after an absence and asks if you did anything yesterday, that's a stupid question.  In Dwight fashion, I usually respond with, "No, we put on black armbands and mourned your absence" before giving them a real answer.  (If you are a student reading this, it would make a world of difference if you change it to "What did I miss yesterday?")  My freshman year in college, I was standing in one of a thousand registration lines.  This one was for student IDs, and there was a large sign (like 3 feet tall) that said, "This is not the line for parking passes."  Yet, as I waited in that line, I heard the person at the table say to the 12 people in front of me, "No, this is not the line for parking passes."  These are people enrolling in college, and rather than read the sign, they waited in line and then asked that rather stupid question.  Most of them walked away in a huff as though it was the school's fault they had wasted their time in line.

Don't misunderstand.  I love questions.  The best part of my day is when a student asks a question to which I do not know the answer.  Then, we get to find out together.  I get asked deep and wonderful questions on a daily basis.  Even after 20 years of teaching, I still get asked questions I've never been asked before, and I love that.  I never want to discourage curiosity.  I just don't believe lying to students is the way to encourage them.

The strangest question I've ever been asked happened in my first year.  For context, we were in the middle of a unit about the Apollo program.  We had been talking about men walking on the moon for over a week.  At the time the question was asked, we were watching a video in which Dave Scott was driving the lunar rover, and ten minutes earlier, there had been a scene in which they considered their landing site options because there was concern about the 18000ft mountain range in the area.  Okay, you got all that?  Are you ready?  Nicole raised her hand and said, "Miss Hawks, how big is the moon?"  That is not a stupid question, and I don't know the answer right off the top of my head, but I do know how to calculate it, so I started doing that.  Then she said, "I mean, like, if you brought it down here, would it be as big as me?"  I can only imagine my facial expression as my finger hovered over the calculator buttons for a moment.  When I told her that it was, in fact, about 2000 miles bigger than her, she asked, "How come it look so small, then?"  This fifteen-year-old had no understanding of the fact that when things are far away, they look smaller.  Later on, I found out that she thought having "stars in your eyes" was literal.  She believed stars could fit in your eyes.

By the way, Nicole did not preface that with "this might be a stupid question."  When a kid says that, it almost never is.  It's just a kid who lacks confidence and is perhaps a bit tangential.  Instead of responding with the falsehood that there are no stupid questions, I say, "We won't know until you ask.  Let's find out."  Kids will eventually find out that there are stupid questions (perhaps when they have kids), so it isn't a good life-lesson to teach them that there aren't.  The better life-lesson, in my opinion, is "Don't be afraid to ask a stupid question."