Instructors are to instruct students. They know everything. They know how to teach the topic. Whereas, the students do know nothing about the topic. They are not supposed to interrupt the instructor. If a student has a question, he has to keep it in mind and rehearse it over and over. Other students around him may be clever enough to find the solution by themselves. Or the student himself may be the only one that mistakenly missed an important part of the instructor’s explanation.
Or even in the case where a thorough understanding of the instructor’s lecture would not provide with the answer to more than one student in the class, the instructor may say “Oh, by now, some wise students of you might have noticed that the equation in question is not useful at all in some special case. I left it unsaid purposely because I want to have you think about the topic profoundly.”
The instructor is Mr. Know-All with absolute power to rule everything in the class. The students basically are the dumb people who beg for instructor’s mercy to let them learn and become wiser. This is fundamental social structure in the school classrooms when I was a student. As I described in another story in this book, the Japanese social system automatically determines an absolute authority in any given group, by attributes of the group members, such as age, title, or familiarity to the topic in question.
How the instructors in the Japanese classrooms act is just like how presidents of companies act at the managerial conferences. The only one designated person forms the trend of the meeting, discussion, or lecture. Others will understand, follow, support, comment only if they are asked, and raise questions when they are encouraged to do so, but they never argue, debate or even discuss.
When I had a question in mind during the lecture at OIT, I usually kept it in mind. In this case, I had to be more careful than in Japan. Even if I had been fully concentrated to the lecture, I might have misinterpreted any subtle word of the instructor’s. When the question popped up in my mind, I scanned the classroom to find any student with a suspicious face. Then I refrained it in mind again and again to cross off every possibility that I was missing something or that I was misunderstanding something. It took more than a few minutes. When I became relatively sure that the question was worth asking at least for myself, the lecture had advanced far ahead.
Then I normally started to phrase the question. No one would proof read the expression that I was to use to raise a question, while the lecture was on. I sometimes jotted down the question and revise it. “My English is not good enough to follow your lecture perfectly. And I believe that you explained that electricity here comes through this circuitry A on the page 24. And when I take a look on the figure on the page 23…” This was how I prepare to ask only one question.
But this was not enough. The last step is to prepare hypothetical alternative of the instructor’s answer and load the vocabulary in my memory from somewhere in the textbook. I just paged through back and forth to collect the words that the instructor would use to answer my question. If I had not done this instant vocabulary building, I would not have understood the instructor’s answer. Then, in the worst case, the instructor had to play the role of an English instructor’ also. That was not something I would like to have the instructor be bothered to do.
“OK. So much for today, folks! See you next Monday.” As soon as the instructor said, all the students stood up and approached to the door. I was often the only one who rushed to the instructor with the textbook and a piece of paper in my hands. The paper was the important scenario of my questioning.
The instructors would always appreciate my preparation for asking questions. Then they would kindly and minutely explain what was missing in my idea. I really liked such attitude of the instructors at OIT, or maybe in the United States. Some, just some, instructors in Japan might say, “I see your point. I see what’s missing in your understanding. OK. So take a look at this… page 24. You missed the information here. Read it carefully again, and you will see. If you still can’t find the answer, come back again. I think you will find it, though.” There was not any instructor like that at OIT.
After helping me understand the problem, OIT instructors would often say, “Sho, actually this is a good question. Other students may not have fully understood it. Why didn’t you ask it in the class?” I would say, “I thought that I might be one the few stupid students that did not understand this. Maybe I’m not that stupid, but my verbal English skills are not reliable at all.” “Oh, I can understand you very well.” “But it’s because I prepared so much for this question!” Then they realize how I coped with the English barrier.
“Sho, we say, ‘There is no dumb question.’” They would continue, “We think that any question will be helpful to someone working on the same thing. Don’t you think so? If you can feel comfortable, you are welcomed to ask any question.”
I have heard many students asking stupid questions for they were too lazy to do the reading assignment in advance. These students do not seem to hesitate to ask questions that would result in no merit to other students around. I disliked these arrogant students.
Despite the undeniable existence of these students who are dumb enough to ask so-called dumb questions, I praise the firm belief and the tolerable attitude that the instructors have. This really made me convinced that the college instructors in the United States in general act more professional than those in Japan.