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Any More Questions?

Writer's picture: Benjamin EvansBenjamin Evans


 I had a science teacher that told me I was the first actually observant student they had in a few decades. I, along with the rest of the class, thought it was a joke. I barely had a C in the class and had a lot more questions than answers. Then he quieted down the laughter with the comment:

“At least he IS asking questions.”

  I went from being mildly distracting to the rest of the class to being loathed in a matter of seconds. I had several questions about that too but never really got any answers.

   Did I stop asking questions? NOPE. I went on like business as usual. Sometimes my questions were met with scowls from my fellow students and at  other times chuckles. 

    I also had several other teachers who just wanted me to shut up and stop asking questions. They were not quiet about it either. “I don’t care if it’s not right, it’s what we teach at this school. Keep quiet till you get to college, then ask all the questions you want.”

    I think I made it a day or two before something popped up that my brain couldn't wrap around. I think some teachers might have just passed me to get rid of me, and others might have wished they had. My grades were good, but I was asked to leave a lot. Who knows?

    I am planning on asking a lot of questions in college though. Since that is apparently the place for it, at least according to one witness. I guess I’ll find out when I get there.



Wrong questions?


    I always heard there is no such thing as a dumb question but to some people there are things known as the wrong questions and apparently I have asked them. Several of them. Or at least that's what they said. I didn’t know there was such a thing as a wrong question but that is just something else I'm either wrong about or asked before I got to college.

    It was finally explained to me in a not so polite way.

  “ All we are doing is getting you from here to there, in your case college. Forget about all those questions you keep asking and just stick to the task at hand. Point a to point b. If you have a question about the subject material and it pertains to the lessons then you can ask, otherwise, wait till you get there. Are we clear?”

 “ I think so.”

   “Just stop asking the wrong questions.”

  “Like they did with Pluto?”

  Her face went from somewhat of restrained disdain to complete bewilderment and to me looked like it might be turning towards anger. I know this look better than I should and started to explain to hopefully avoid any unnecessary hostility towards me. Personally I think any hostility is unnecessary but I’m not going to ask about that. Yet..

    “They asked the wrong question about pluto. That really smart guy said it wasn’t a planet and convinced everybody else that it really wasn't either and they changed it to be a Plutoid. Then he got all kinds of acclaim for it and Pluto became the first Plutoid in history. Then a satellite flew by it and found out it has an atmosphere. Now it’s back to being a planet. A dwarf planet or just a really small planet. Which is what it was to begin with. Asking if it was a planet was the wrong question and nobody mentions him anymore.”

   Amazingly, the look I was getting was starting to change. This is a look I don’t  know that well. It meant my way of seeing it was starting to make sense to her. 

  I kept going

   “Nothing about Pluto changed at all. It was still the same as it ever was; the only thing that did change was what we call it. Asking what is Pluto was the wrong question or a misleading one. What they were really asking is what should we call Pluto? I can’t see what difference it makes what we call it. It still does exactly the same thing as it always did. So was that a WRONG question.”

    Then she started laughing and looked a little on the shocked side of things.

    She very hesitantly said “I guess it was.”

   “Are the questions I ask like that?”

  “NO.”

  “So, are my questions wrong?”

  “No, but they still disrupt class. Not many people see things the way you do.”

  “You’re joking..”

   She laughed and just asked that I tune it down for the sake of class and that I could keep asking questions, but to wait till I got to college for a lot of them.And that maybe I should write them down.

 And I have.

A LOT OF THEM.



Right questions?


 Everybody knows about the fig guy and gravity. Some really smart guy a long time ago was sitting under a tree and supposedly an apple hit him on the head and all of the sudden he discovered gravity. That’s the short version anyway. I have no idea what fig bars and apple trees and gravity have to do with each other, but some people think they go together. (I have a lot of questions I have learned not to ask about things other people think go together.)

   He didn’t discover anything though. Gravity had always been there, but I guess he was the first person to ask why things fall and gave it a name. Then he came up with a few laws or a way to explain some things anyway.

   They still don’t know how gravity works though. All anybody knows about it , is what it does not how it does it. Didn’t everybody already know that?

Or

   Before him people thought if you jumped off of something you might just float,  . . sometimes.


    I’m pretty sure people knew what falling was even without a name for it. I can’t be the only person in the history of the world who trips over my feet or other things sometimes.

Or am I?

   There’s a rabbit hole I think I’ll steer clear of.

   I honestly didn’t know there were such things as right and wrong questions until I got told I was asking the wrong ones. I just thought they were questions. I had been told we are supposed to ask questions because that's how we get answers.

    It turns out I don’t really need answers for a lot of things some people do. There are a lot of things in the world I don’t need to understand. I’m not really sure anyone needs to understand some things. I’m not sure of the benefit of some answers especially when other things in our world need attention.

   Like what color a dinosaur was. I’m not sure how that is going to make the world a better place right now. How can we get our world away from its dependency on fossil fuels would be a good question but what the animal looked like that has become a fossil fuel might not be the most beneficial route to be pursuing at the moment.

    Don’t get me wrong I think fossils are pretty cool and I would love to have some of those really big shark teeth. I just don’t really care for the oily bits.

    I’m no expert though, but we do have them, experts. They are asking some of the right questions and have some good answers if people want to listen.

    That might be one of the best questions: How do we get people to listen? 

    I’ll ask that and a whole lot of other questions when I get to college. Which is where I’m told I should be asking all these questions. 

    I guess I’ll find out.

    Till then I think I’ll do something that I have more answers to than questions: Fishing!


written by Benjamin Evans







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