Teach them to ask questions!

One of my worst academic memory, once after the chairman asked "any questions?" at the end of a distinguished lecture with some 200 attendants, I raised my hand. The Chairman said: "Jeremy, of course. Why am I not surprised? Anybody else has a question?". This was repeated a few months ago, in a different location, with a different chairman. Sometime I will start to wonder if I may be asking too many questions ;)

From Jérémy "The Thingker"

On the door of my office, there is a poster of A. Einstein with the note "Even Einstein asked questions". I added a post-it above "Even" and made it read "In particular". In the words of Glencora Borradaile, aka "Silent Glen":

“Listening to a talk with the goal of asking one or two questions results in increased attention and a deeper understanding of the material.” (http://www.glencora.org/silent-glen-speaks/a-flat-6-pack-of-soda/)

In high-school, older schoolmates beat me up for asking too many questions in biology class, "annoying the professor" and "making the class last overtime". As an undergraduate, the head of the department took a dislike in me because I was asking too many questions in his compilation class. Things got better once the TA (thanks Martine!) explained to him that I was not all bad. Still an undergraduate, I was hushed from asking a question at the Ph.D. defense of Philippe Andary about genetic algorithms (he was my TA and I had played with implementing GA myself), not knowing that "this is not done!": he did forgive me :)

As a doctorate student, I saw my advisor always asking questions at seminars, often not waiting for the end of the talk, flexing her mind around new ideas and clarifying concepts early so that not to waste the following. When we organized the "interdisciplinary" seminar with Christophe Genolini and Antoine Ducoulombier, we made sure that people were encouraged to ask question during the talks. I always have questions, sometime too many, some times too far fetched, (hopefully) few times expressing my own error of understanding (again, hopefully early enough in the talk that it improves my understanding of the rest). If I don't ask a question at the end of a talk, it probably means that I did not pay attention to it. Sorry :(.

Contrarily to the saying, there is a thing as "bad" questions, too personal, too out of topic, too time-consuming. There is no room for interruptions in a conference talk packing several years of scientific work into 20mns. But learning to ask good questions is one of the main attribute of scientific research, and more generally of a sane way of life (children, do learn to question advertisements! Adults, do learn to question the condition of your health coverage!). We should jump on any opportunity to teach the art of asking questions! And yet, from high-school to academia, questions in class or seminars (conferences are another theme, since the time is so short) are met with mixed reaction, from fun and mocking to great annoyance. In (some) Mathematic seminars, nobody asks questions at the end of the talk, let alone during the talk. I was told that in Germany this was not welcome either, even in Computer Science.

In my teaching I teach to my students to ask questions (or at least to answer mine). During the first weeks of class in Orsay and Waterloo, I was eating apples while waiting for students to ask or answer questions: any fruit finished in class meant a "harder" problem at the exam. Those were exceptional students and they learned fast :). Recently, I learned from Eric Mazur about Peer Instruction, who put me to think about how to implement it in Computer Science, and Theoretical Computer Science in particular (could not find a trace of someone already working on it?). Hopefully the next generation of academics will ask more questions :)