Stupid Questions

First an update and then on to the true topic, the title of the blog.

I'm 2 days away from completing my summer course. Notice the singular noun "course" and not the plural which would have been the case had I not dropped my first ever university course. After the first test, and a few homeworks (one which was a zero because he had switched book editions while keeping his course supplement the same), my grade was hovering in the low C range. I figured I'd be able to pull that back up on the next test. When the next test proved to rock me worse than the first, I dropped it. I have no desire to have a C calculated into my GPA (not to mention that, given the trend, my grade would have been a letter lower than that).

Having said that, the class average, across the first two tests which I was there for, was a 62%. That was the main reason for me dropping it. When a teacher's class has a D- as a class average on his or her tests, something is amiss, and it doesn't lie with the students.

On a more joyful note, I've been spending some quality time with my girlfriend on the weekends, which has included: going to Indy to meet Shawn and Monica, going to her hometown fair to see her MC a "lil miss and mr." contest as well as model for a fashion show, and then this weekend, go to the Elkhart Co fair this weekend. Great times.

Speaking of fairs, since there is a 3-week dead spot between summer sessions and fall semester, I will be working at the Indiana State Fair for that period of time. That was nice to have worked out so I stay busy and make some money going into the school-year.

I will be going to Warped tour again this year. It has become a staple of my summers and something I wish would come around more often. Forty bucks for almost ten hours of 5 stages of music. I currently have 12 bands I plan on watching. So far, I've been able to see all the ones I've wanted to see in the past without them playing simultaneously. Hopefully that continues this year.

And oh ya, by the way... I turn 21 in less than 10 days.

Now on to the title of the blog:

There is a phrase I've heard quite often. Some might call it words of wisdom or something along those lines. I call it wrong. The phrase is "there is no such thing as a stupid question".

Let me explain some examples of where this certainly does not hold:

An instance where someone asks a question and either discovers the answer before the other person can generate a response or, along the same lines, was simply too lazy to "look" and "see" the answer right in front of them. I do this all the time, especially when I'm at work. I'll ask someone where a tool or something is and they pretty much point right in front of me to where the object was. I hate it and its a perfect example of when someone asks a stupid question. Its the same thing when someone asks a question and then discovers the answer on their own before anyone can respond. Did you really have to ask the question if it took less than 2 seconds to find the answer and you found it on your own? Probably not.

In both cases, stopping to think, for only a brief moment, will save time and the annoyance of the person I'm/your asking the question to. These types of questions are stupid because they're unnecessary. Not to mention that very little insight is actually gained by the actual asking of the question. Typically, the goal of a question is to find some sort of information in respect to that question which, before asking the question, the interrogator had no access to. When a stupid question is asked, this entire process becomes meaningless because, the goal (information) was already available to the questioner without the need for the question, making the question-asking needless and irrelevant.

One might say that we only discover stupid questions in retrospect, after we find that we discovered the information on our own, before any interlocutor could respond. But I would be willing to bet, that if we took a moment to think, and to consider just what it is we're asking before we ask our question, we would all save ourselves the time and annoyance of asking stupid questions.