c9-questions

When I began this whole adventure of learning how to program I made a million mistakes. It seemed that all I could make was mistakes. I quickly became discouraged, thinking that I was never going to get anywhere or learn anything because I couldn't get anything to work. Then I took a step back and tried to think about what I was doing wrong. Jumping out at me from the long lost I made of the things that could have been putting me off track was one major theme: details. I was missing them, I wasn't including them, I wasn't paying attention to them and I was mispelling them all over the place. I have learned over the course of the past few weeks that the everything hinges on the details, and now that I have the task of analyzing what makes a "good" question all I can think about is, yes, you guessed it, the details.

I have a daughter who is nearly four years old, and as you might expect, my day is full of the question "why?". From the moment I am woken up to the moment my daughter is finally convinced to stay in her bed at night, I hear that one question. Over and over again. The funny thing is that when I give my daughter an answer to her why, she whispers it back to herself as if she were computing the information she was just given. Inevitably, once she's done computing, another why quickly follows about some part of my answer that she didn't comprehend, and we go back and forth with a why and an answer until she is satisfied or looses interest. What I have noticed is that the root of our repititious discourse is the fact that she doesn't know how to ask the questions to get the answers she wants to get.

This morning on the way to school we saw a firetruck sitting outside the emergency room of a hospital, and she asked me why it was there. So I gave her a possible reason as to why a firetruck could be at an emergency room without any scary details. "But why does it have its lights on?". Again, I postulated, and supplied her with some idea why the truck's lights were on while at the hospital. "But why is there no fire?" It was then that I knew her question wasn't "why was there a firetruck at the hospital?", it was "if there is no fire at the hospital, why is there a firetruck sitting in front of it with its lights on like there was a fire?".

At her stage of development she doesn't kow how to put all those details together to ask that specific of a question in one shot. Sure, working through the progression of whys and hows, she gets more and more specific, and gets an answer to the thought that made her ask why in the first place, but it takes time. She needs each response to provide her with a detail she didn't know about before. That leads her to another question, receiving another detail, and so on down the line. Imagine what we, as adults, could achieve with the time to ask any questions we might have in that matter. Unfortunately we don't have time like that.

So, I guess the point that I am trying to make is that a "good" question is detailed and specific. This is true of all questions whether they are about a firetruck sitting at a hospital or how one might iterate over the properties of a JavaScript object when they are nested a few levels deep. In order to get a detailed and specific answer, a "good" question must be equally detailed and specific. The information seeker needs to form a question that gives the audience as much direction and background information as possible in a concise manner so that the answer they are given matches the idea they are looking for. Its all in the details.

The discourse my daughter and I had this morning took almost ten minutes. I think that one of the major reasons it took so long was that I didn't know exactly what she was looking for, because she didn't have the words to lay it out for me. If she had asked me "why is there a firetruck sitting in front of the hospital with its lights on when I don't see a fire or smell smoke?", I would have known a lot of the information that caused her to ask me the question. It would have told me that she knows there is a fire if she smells smoke. It would have told me that she knows firetrucks are often at places where there is a fire. It would have told me that she knows a firetruck has its lights on in the event of a fire. It also would have told me that she is under the assumption that firemen only deal with fires. I would have been able to explain why all those concepts might not have been matching up in the scene we were watching, and how it could have been a number of situations that caused the firetruck to be at the hospital with lights on that had nothing to do with a fire. If her initial question had been a "good" question she would have had all the answers laid out for her in a single minute, and we could have gotten back to playing "I Spy".

Ultimately a "good" question must be one that is composed of a number of characteristics. A good question is one that is detailed and specific. A good question is one that has been formulated in a way to convey as much information about the idea as possible. A good question is one that conveys that information in a direct and concise manner. A good question is one that takes time and patience to ask as well as answer. I think that being able to ask a good question is a skill that has to be practiced over time, it is not something that anyone is going to be able to do without any effort. All that being said, I am a firm believer that no question is exactly "bad", and that all and any questions should be asked, despite their classification as good or not.