This is a tough one to answer.

I think the essential thing for asking questions is to think-out the question in detail, so as not to waste the time and energy of your prof.

I don't appreciate those people who think with their mouths open myself so I try and talk only when I've thought-out what to say.. unless I'm just chatting casually with a friend.


should people make others feel stupid? .. Not if they are nice people

But if you regularly find yourself in situations where you do feel stupid maybe it's your attitude which sets these things up? Are you testing people to see if they accept you 'the way you are' on purpose? are you looking for punishment? just saying

I do think there are times when only some people should speak and others should be quiet and only reply in essential language.. like in a court of law, or when the discussion at hand is important.

Since you play: nothing worse than trying to set-up a groove in music only to have some musician fumble their way through the song because they think they can play it or are trying to learn it there and then right?

it is better to play two notes on-time and in the right spot than to try and play a full arrangement when you aren't sure of what you're doing.

and it's best to play within your limits and do the best you can... stretching your limits gradually through practice at home etc.


Excellence is essential, people should respect and seek excellence for themselves.

some people do love to make others feel stupid, but those people aren't really worth bothering with too much.. really talented and gifted people know better.

 People that make other people feel stupid are basically imbeciles themselves. They don't carry a chip on their shoulders, they have a mental scoliosis, regardless of how smart they are- or think they are-.
 Most of the real brilliant, genial men and women I ran into in my life have been rather humble and low key, and  made talking and working with them a marvelous learning experience, not an uncomfortable and impossible to win contest.
 Some of the overwhelmingly blinding, fire works-type smartness that on occasion people show might just be a learned, acquired trick, generally contained within a well rehearsed subject, while real intelligence applies to a wider aspect of activities in most stages of life. So, beware of the phonies!
 

Well, you can learn something from almost any encounter, and as previous posts have pointed out, sometimes it is about you and sometimes it is about them.

I would make the distinction between "feeling stupid" in the sense of seeing that your question collapses or doesn't really strike at the heart of things, and "feeling stupid" in the sense of feeling that you have no place in the discussion/no future in the field.

Avoiding the second is mainly psychological (as well as knowing when to filter out unnecessary criticism from authority figures). It's an important and worthy topic, but so is the first, which is what my personal strategy would be to focus on. There is a great art to asking good questions.

It can be hard to recover emotionally as a lecturer from being asked an off topic question and for this reason many people get frustrated when confronted with "bad" questions -- let me explain this. After all, a teacher has been pouring out their intellectual soul to you for a quarter, a semester, or even just the hour so far. You're sitting there listening -- they assume you understand.  When you open your mouth, they get to see whether or not that was true.

If you've ever watched a bad talk show host, you can see what an effect this has.

Every field has its own language of relevant questions. If you spend a lot of money on a nice bottle of wine and open it for your new neighbors, and the guy swirls it in his glass and says "Wow, exactly the color of cherry Pepsi," you know in your heart that he's not going to appreciate it the way that someone who says "Malbec?" would. Maybe the Pepsi remark is not so unreasonable, but it doesn't matter. It is incumbent upon the person who wants to be educated, to be initiated into a field, to explore the field's strange vocabulary and to figure out what questions it considers interesting. How do people speak about the subject you care about? What do they ask, and why? What are the key details -- what does one pay attention to?

Practice on yourself -- on your friends in the course -- on your TAs. Start debates at your dinner table. Post questions online (if such a course were to arise again, I'd be willing to bet a number of people here know about the church fathers). Make friends with the "smart kids" in the class and see how they think about things. And then start asking, slowly. After a couple of months of effort, usually there is either a breakthrough where the new language starts to seem much more interesting/relevant, or else you may decide this particular field's way of categorizing knowledge is not your cup of tea, which is also worth knowing.

In general, any serious insight into how people organize the world will turn out to be very useful information. Understanding "what is a good question?" in any given domain is one of the best ways to achieve this kind of insight.