No Dumb Questions for Smart People

When entity learners run up against something hard to understand or a problem tough to solve, they become early quitters. In contrast, incremental learners chip away at a challenge like a block of stone, gradually making it manageable

~ David Perkins Making Learning Whole



My friend Michelle is one of the smartest people I know but has never had the advantage of a university or college education. What makes her smart is the questions she asks.
 
She is never afraid that asking a question about something she doesn’t know, for fear it would make her look stupid. Her curiosity and desire to remove a little area of ignorance takes precedence over what anyone might think. For example, when I use a word she has never heard before she almost always asks me what it means.
 
And in other areas, the questions she asks seem to target very precisely what it is she doesn’t understand, which implies a finely tuned awareness of when she feels confused and what precisely she is confused about.
 
Consider the following example:

 
• Eight months ago: I gave Michelle some training in VBA (the programming language that lies behind Microsoft Excel). She learned just the basics and there was a big time gap between then and now. She had never programmed before.
 
• Two months ago: I wrote a VBA program for modifying a spreadsheet her team used in its work. When I was debugging it, I was able to quickly see what needed to be fixed just by glancing at the code. Michelle asked me how I could do it so quickly and my answer was that I was used to how the code was structured. But this was an interesting question and one that as you will see sheds light on how Michelle thinks.
 
• A month ago: The program needed to be amended and Michelle decided that she wanted to tackle the task herself and only to ask me if she got stuck. And perhaps not surprisingly with such a can-do attitude, she was able to do most of the changes without any help from me. And the parts that had her stumped turned out to be things that had me stumped as well!
 
• Two weeks later: We were building more functionality into this program and I was showing Michelle how she could use a ‘for loop’ ( e.g. for i = 1 to 100, , next i) to modify some selected values in the spreadsheet. And she asked me what the “i” was for. It was a simple question and a good one yet one I found surprisingly difficult to answer since I had been using such variables for so long that they had become second nature. After a couple of attempts I was able to explain it although oddly enough I wasn’t very satisfied with my own explanation!
   
  And when we were working on a couple of bugs in the program, Michelle was able to pinpoint the problem areas before I could. In effect, her focused work with the program had given her the same sort of familiarity with its structure that she had asked me about only a few weeks before!

  
Now I have a PhD in mathematics, another postgraduate degree in Medical Statistics, and have studied computing in my undergraduate degree. I have around eight published papers in my field. Yet here was someone who had graduated high school yet was able to ask smart questions and to solve programming problems.
 
The question is how?
 
The clue is in the above description of what happened:

 
1. Once she learned the basics, Michelle challenged herself to modify the program herself, rather than getting me to do it. In the process, she gained a better idea of what she understood and what she didn’t. Her drive for mastery overcame any fear she might have had of failing. And in the process she gained an implicit knowledge of the structure of the code. ( Part of this is also that Michelle has a fiercely independent nature and wants to be able to do things for herself.)
2. As she went over the program she became more and more familiar with what different parts of the program did, and was even able to work out for herself the parts she didn’t initially understand. In doing so, she gained greater confidence for dealing with future challenges.
3. Only when she came up against a problem she couldn’t solve did she seek help, knowing that she had reached the limits of what she could do on her own. And yet by stretching herself, those limits were ones that were challenging even for someone who had used VBA for a few years. By challenging herself she was more able to see the current (and temporary!) limits of her knowledge.
4. She watched as I wrote the extra functionality and listened as I explained what I was doing and observed how I troubleshooted problems when some of it didn’t work. In the process, she learned some more about problem solving while programming.
5. She kept asking questions until she got an answer she understood.

Sadly, Michelle is the only person I work closely with who has this level of curiosity and willingness to challenge herself to overcome her ignorance. So many people would rather pretend they understand than risk anyone knowing what they don’t know.
 
And this is why I say that Michelle is one of the smartest people I know. Most people would rather remain in ignorance than admit to it and have it removed, including a lot of people with degrees. (In fact, a few of the people I have known with advanced coursework degrees don’t qualify as smart at all, at least not in this sense.)
 
But Michelle is constantly growing in the things she knows and doesn’t remain ignorant for long about anything because she is prepared to ask and learn. And in this respect, Michelle is as smart as anyone with a PhD because she had the thirst for knowledge and the willingness to try and satisfy that thirst.
 
And it is this learning attitude that qualifies her as truly smart.