Asking questions comes naturally to us. Children are habitually inquisitive; they ask all sorts of random questions; ‘why is the sky blue’; ‘why does broccoli taste so bad’; or ‘why does poop stink’! The problem arises when we start growing up and start getting ashamed of the questions.
‘What if others think I’m stupid’, ‘what if everyone else knows this and if I ask this question everyone will laugh at me?’ And thus, begins the conditioning of conformism. Read whatever is there in the text books, memorise that, and pour it all out in the answer papers, get an A+ in the exams; and everyone is happy! Even parents aid to this behaviour by silencing kids when they ask random questions and by telling them to just finish and revise whatever is in the syllabus.
You may say, this was a thing of the past. Now we have google, all the information is on our fingertips and we can ask and get the answer to any of our queries instantly. But here you forget
how powerful a tool conditioning is. Once you are conditioned to just follow instructions and not ask questions, your brain adapts to that. How many of us search for the meaning of an abstruse word immediately? (Did you search for the meaning of abstruse before reading this line?) Most of us don’t, because we have lost our natural knack of asking questions.
And this is where quizzing comes to the rescue. Quizzing reignites that trait of asking random questions. And when you start asking questions; one question will lead you to another, and the cycle
goes on and in the long run the world around you starts making a lot more sense. But this can’t be a one-off thing; this habit of asking random questions should get ingrained into your psyche. Whenever you encounter something you don’t know, or any random query pops into your head; don’t put it aside thinking that its stupid or think that you’ll look it up later.
And this is also how you become a good quizzer, by questioning anything and everything. In the next article we will discuss some more practical ways in which you can hone your quizzing skills. Till then, #Stay_Tuned.