General Chat

Did you never ask questions of a teacher when you were in school??

Most of them back then and into the 60s (don't know about more recently), would never ever tell you if you had asked a question that they could not answer because they didn't know.

It was felt (I think) that it would lower them in the student's eyes.


I know it happened to me, only I never realised it at the time ....... sometimes it became obvious later in the term or next term, or even in a later year.


When I got my teaching job in a girls' grammar school, I decided that I would not do this, and it turned out that I had to 'fess up on more than one occasion because I took over in January from another teacher who had to leave when her husband was posted elsewhere.

The problem was that she was teaching not only her main subject of Biology but also 3rd year physics. Biology was my subject, and I had no worries, but I had dropped Physics at the end of my 3rd year in grammar school 10 years previously.

There was no way the school was going to give another teacher the course load ........ so they told me to work out of the text book.

Next problem was ................ most of the physics curriculum for that year was above the level where I had to drop the course, so I had never ever learnt about it.

I was always being asked a question that I myself had not yet reached in the text book, yet I had promised myself I would never fudge.

So I admitted that I did not know, and would try to let them know the answer "next time". Which I did.


Much later I was told by one of the girls in that year that they knew that I was learning as I went, but they admired me because I never tried to tell them an answer unless I knew it.

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know.

We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. :-S

Wind and that other stuff!

...or their own importance! :-D

Surely these vessels aren’t empty. They are full of hot air ;-)

Or maybe they've gone on for so long that they've forgotten the question.

Or maybe they are just genuinely trying to help, know a little bit but try and imagine the rest.

Maybe because they are so puffed up with their own self importance it’s beneath them to say don’t know the answer to that one

Make the most noise. Concerning a work matter, i asked someone a question that I thought knew the answer, I had a very long answer and realised he knew nothing on the subject, upon asking someone else I got the answer and it was spot on, so why on earth don’t people just say they don’t know! Grrr.