The gifted child asks a question he doesn't know the answer to, but the teacher lacks the meta-cognitive ability to realize that he doesn't know the answer and before he can stop it his brain just made something up.
Few people are willing to say "I don't know" when asked a question about a subject they're supposed to know. To sound smart, one can give a vague answer full of jargon, leaving the details as an exercise. I've also seen people complicate things, go off on a tangent, and then point out that they went off on a tangent and resume the lecture as though the question was never asked. Others just say "It's complicated" and leave it at that. The idea is to give a non-answer that sounds enough like an answer to quash further inquiry.
The point is that most people are lazy and just want to get through the day. The average teacher just wants to get through the lesson as smoothly as possible. The path of least resistance is to intimidate students into a passive role. It's not just teachers of average intelligence--even world-class scholars have done some extremely lazy things in the classroom.
A student who constantly asks questions or makes a game of trying to trip up the teacher can come to be seen as a problem to be dealt with, depending on the teacher's disposition.
Right, I agree that this is the outcome. I juat think that no one wakes up in the morning and says "I'm going to skirt my job by intimidating students and BS-ing.
First they don't know the answer then they quickly rationalize under pressure, then they buy their own BS and honestly believe its an answer, then if they get called out they feel vaguely disrespected, and then the intimidation behavior comes out to defend against the disrespect. It's not Machiavellian, it's just brute human instincts reacting to one thing after another. A small child would act the same way on instinct. Later on you ask these people and they'll quite sincerely say they love being challenged.
following on from:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/
I am quite sure in my experience that at some point between the ages of 10-15 I concluded that; "no the rest of the world does not think like me, I think in an unusual way".
This idea disagrees with the typical mind fallacy (where people outwardly generalise to think everyone else has similar minds to their own).
I suspect I started with a typical mind model of the world but at some point it broke badly enough that I re-modelled on "I just think differently to most others".
I wanted to start a new discussion; rather than continuing on from one in 2009;
Where do your experiences lie in relation to typical minds?