"Also a student stopping lectures is the worst - taking time out of the entire classroom who now has to listen to stuff they already understand explained again. Pull someone aside afterwards for clarification."
You are part of the reason why people are scared to speak up and ask "stupid" questions, and I feel like that ends up being a net negative.
* basic reading comprehension issues
* trivial matters that could have been looked up in an obvious reference
* completely unrelated tangents, asked out of idle curiosity
* questions asked solely to demonstrate "participation" (nothing wrecks a classroom like a "participation" grade)
In my experience, these comprise the bulk of questions that are asked in non-STEM university and graduate settings.
I don't call these questions stupid, but they are a waste of time, do not move the ball down the field at all, and discourage self-learning.
Seems like you've been in higher level STEM settings and your experience outside of that has been low level electives, you've had limited and unusually poor samples, or you're just speaking out of bias for (presumably) your own path in life.
I don't think people who are not "STEM" are generally going around navigating the world and school like uninformed, idiot freshman who don't know how to participate in their own education... At least not any more then people in STEM are ;-)
So I think that cultures are much different in that regard. A lot of it makes sense give topics that were taught. It is not that non-stem was inferior, it is that different topics have different pedagogy.
But, if students get points for asking question often enough, they will be trained to ask any question that cross their mind. They will be used to actively desperately look for any question to ask cause they are used to need that point.
That for sure is a much worse outcome than the occasional “really?” kind of question. Some simple nudges to colleagues as checks (did you do the reading? Did you try to answer it yourself first?) before asking questions to keep things productive, for example, might be a good starting point rather than a Potentially more hostile approach that could frustrate well-meaning questioners.
The student was assigned reading material beyond their level. They will need mentoring, which a good teacher (i.e. senior developer) is well equipped to provide and should be willing[1] to provide. The teacher should also ensure that no other student is in the same situation but is hiding it due to risk of the social stigma.
> trivial matters that could have been looked up in an obvious reference
Student is not aware of resources available to them or does not yet have this habit. Provide them with pointers to resources, or engage them in habit-forming exercises for looking up references[1].
> completely unrelated tangents, asked out of idle curiosity
Idle curiosity is the best attribute (correction: skill) you can ask for in a student (any developer). Stifling it will cause a drop in creative thinking and therefore damage problem solving skills.
An unrelated tangent is unrelated only if the teacher (senior developer) does not possess the skills necessary to relate the question back to the topic at hand. Something made the student think of the so-called tangent. In such occurrences, explore[1] the tangent and how it may possibly relate to the topic at hand, with the help of the student, as a learning opportunity (an opportunity for the teacher, rather than the student, to learn).
> questions asked solely to demonstrate "participation" (nothing wrecks a classroom like a "participation" grade)
If a student participates just to demonstrate participation, this is usually because the class dynamics (work politics) are skewed against the student (damaging their self-esteem), or the rewards for good performance are not distributed evenly -on merit.
When you think a student is participating just for show, assume good faith. That is, assume that the student is genuinely interested and explore the idea together[1] with the student. If it turns out that the student was actually interested, you just prevented a misunderstanding caused by your own burn out. If they were participating just for show, you just helped them hone in on their skills and provided guidance on how to better participate in class (meeting/workplace).
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[1] If you are not willing to do this, stop teaching (read: either stop hiring non-senior developers or quit). Your role in the university (read: workplace) as an instructor (read: senior developer) is not only to manage and produce research (read: projects and deliverables) but also to develop your students' (read: non-senior developers') skills. Earn your salary.
And meanwhile the rest of us is waiting twiddling fingers, because someone could not google that tangent or asked question anyone who is paying attention could answer.
This does not annoy just teacher. It is annoying students who were paying attention and were there whole time way more.
> If a student participates just to demonstrate participation, this is usually because the class dynamics (work politics) are skewed against the student (damaging their self-esteem), or the rewards for good performance are not distributed evenly -on merit.
When you have one-two people out of over 100 asking such questions all the time in multiple unrelated classes, the issue is not all of us or all those teachers.
> If they were participating just for show, you just helped them hone in on their skills and provided guidance on how to better participate in class (meeting/workplace).
Please, please, please, don't teach students to make meetings longer by asking tangents. That is for after meeting when those not interested can leave. Meeting moderation is literally about ability to keep discussion on point.
I find this more in public talks than in classrooms, but yeah, that guy is always out there somewhere.
If one is engaged in conversation, one should not restrain himself from asking whatever for politics/social issues.
Let the question be asked, it can be esaily dismissed or ignored if it's a bad/not useful question, but it can be asked too anyway!
Thinking that you get to ask for clarification whenever you feel like it just because you don't understand something is very self entitled - you have to consider the context first. If someone is explaining something to you directly or the purpose of the meeting is to teach something to the whole team by all means ask for clarification.
Well, for a classroom with high velocity that would indeed be an issue. Mixed capacity classrooms might help less apt students, but can at the same time slow down more advanced ones.
In real world projects you often get new people assigned to the team, outside people and some of them are very bad at evaluating context for asking questions.
I just had a cross-team sync meeting where this annoying guy from another team with no clue about our requirements or what we attempted started to drill questions on some random library choice - wasting the time of 10 other people and not arriving at anything other than being curios about the tech and wanting to talk about libraries.
Or the other day we had a junior argue with a PM about the requirements because he clearly miss-understood it - it took 10 minutes for the PM to drill down to the source of confusion and wasted 10 minutes of 4 people on the call ! Meanwhile two of us were eye rolling after 2 minutes about how stubborn this kid was when he was completely missing the point - this could have easily be don one a call after our sync meeting.
There is trade-off to which questions should be asked right now and which should not. Both in lecture hall and on meetings.
IMO, instructors who indulge this kind of thing do the whole class and especially the asking student a disservice because the opportunity for self-teaching is lost. Self-teaching is much more important than whatever the lesson of the moment is.
The whole value of being lectured by an expert in your field is that you follow along the material with them and can ask for clarification where necessary.
Eventually someone convinced prof that there cant possibly be well over 3000 meaningful questions and that forum quality will go down if we try.
