I'm exercizing the right not to think

Yesterday I suffered through the most frustrating lecture I've had in a long time - Actually, that's not true, I've sat through a lot of frustrating lectures lately, as my statistics professor isn't what you would call "super efficient" or "able to put two sentences together without trailing off on some mildly amusing yet irrelevant and ultimately confusing tangent" for that matter, but this one was frustrating for a completely different reason. The subject was hermeneutics, and the teacher was this young (for a university teacher anyway), clever man who apparently was all about making students "think". Ha! Like I go to school to do that!

He started by writing the word "OBSERVE!" in large print on the blackboard, then proceeded to slowly and deliberately sort through his notes while the class presumably pondered what great meaning could lay behind this move. "So", he finally said with a knowing smile. "What does this mean?" The following long and painful draging-uneducated-answers-out-of-eager-to-please-students session was followed by another open question: "How is thinking done?" And another: "What does 'understanding' mean?"

I spent most of the lecture not pondering how cognitive processes happen but rather why I get so insanely annoyed with this method of teaching. First off, I should explain that the questions he posed weren't the open philosophical conversation starters they might sound like - in the field of social psychology, there is actually a gigantic amount of research on exactly how people think, what observation is etc etc - and there are definitely right and wrong answers. Basically it was as if he was asking high school kids: "So, do you think there is some special pattern to how Homer writes?"

It's probably 90% my inner control freak talking, but it frustrates me to no end when people ask difficult questions they already know the answers to. What is the point? I mean, apart from seeming really clever? I felt like I was transported to one of those college movies where the young super hip (possibly plagiarized right out of Dead Poets Society) professor really challenges his students, and makes them think like they have never thought before. Not that it's the first time this has occured to me, but if I was in one of those movies, I so would have been the total square who runs to the headmaster at first chance to rat mr Super Cool out. No wonder I had such a riveting social life in high school...