No such thing as a dumb question?

  

Actually, there is. Tune into Daniel Andrews’ daily press conference and you’ll hear plenty of them, usually from Rachel Baxendale – an obnoxious “journalist” for The Australian who sits starry-eyed at the knee of Peta Credlin to deliver breathless revelations on SkyNews about the Eviltude of Dictator Dan in the fight against the Victorian Covid-19 outbreak.

I was a high school teacher for about 2 decades. When I say that the behaviour of some of the “journalists” at Daniel Andrews’ press conferences gives me flashbacks to some of my worst Year 9 classes, believe it. Year 9s can be really obnoxious.

The particular breed of obnoxious Year 9 student that morphs into a Baxendale-style “journalist” at an Andrews presser  knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are smarter than the teacher. They know that every smart-arsed comment is a mark of their genius. Their main aim in the classroom is to impress their peers by scoring points against the teacher in pointless petty argument, and to waste as much of a lesson as possible.

No teacher has ever heard the sort of excuses or clever questions they can come up with and no teacher can fail to be impressed by their cleverness and ultimately cowed into submission by it.

Like a dripping tap, such students are relentless in the quest to wear down the teacher, badgering and haranguing until they achieve their goal,  the bell goes, or the teacher snaps. AND – they think they’re the only one ever to do it.

Is it any wonder teachers become jaded? I am flabbergasted to see Daniel Andrews show up day after day after day to answer the increasingly ridiculous questions respectfully and with seemingly infinite patience. I’d have sent the little shits to the Principal’s office by now, or slapped an after-school detention on them.

This morning in a Twitter thread about the repetitive, ignorant and time-wasting questions posed by Rachel Baxendale, somebody responded to one of my tweets with “It’s always ok to question things”.

So I questioned her – “Have you always been so disingenuous?”

She got a bit annoyed – “It’s a fair question. I was raised to be polite, think for myself, and ask questions where i needed clarification. It’s perfectly ok to do that. You don’t need to blindly accept everything and anything. That’s dogmatic. I was polite to you, leave it now.”

Sigh.

Here’s the thing, If you’re still asking the same questions over and over, many months into a pandemic – questions that have been answered several times already – you haven’t been paying attention. You don’t really want an answer. Your intention is to disrupt and distract and be a general pain in the arse.

Off to the Principal’s office with you.