Comment by rhelz
Comment by rhelz 3 days ago
We don't really have a good name for the emotion that this article describes as "feeling Stupid".
You know what it feels like to be stupid? It feels like you are really smart! I feels like you already know all you need to know, about, say, vaccinations, or about hot to parent somebody else's children.
I'm currently a student teacher, and I'm really struggling to get this point across to my students. I'm asking them questions which make them really think, and since no other teacher has done that to them before, they feel really stupid. But they are not being stupid. If they were being stupid, they'd feel like they had it all figured out.
So yeah, there is this emotion, commonly but unfortunately called "feeling stupid", which you feel when you are trying to figure something out. What would be a good name for that emotion???
You are likely referring to ignorance: not knowing what you don't know thus resulting in a possible false confidence.
The article is about "feeling stupid" in hindsight. Because you cannot unsee it anymore. Which makes you wonder about other myriad obvious things you are missing.
"Feeling stupid" can also mean that you get the impression that everyone around you gets it but you don't.
The irony especially in maths - it seems - is that you can feel stupid because you don't get it and then quit but also keep feeling stupid if you finally got it because in hindsight everything falls so neatly into place that you can't imagine that you had so much trouble to get it in the first place!