During the early 1990s, I volunteered to teach a course called Technical English For Immigrant Russian Engineers, Scientists & Technicians as my way of thanking my grandparents for immigrating to the United States around 1900 - and, therefore, making it unnecessary for me to take such a course. The course was given at Ner Talmud Synagogue in Chicago's West Rogers Park neighborhood where many Russian Jewish immigrants had moved. Their most immediate need was to find work and restart their professional careers. My objective was to train these new arrivals in basic technical English, resumé writing and rudiments of American business corporations.
One of my students was a young man in his early thirties who had just arrived from Byellorussia. He was finding life in the United States very confusing and not at all what he had expected. In addition to these miseries, he found my teaching style particularly irritating.
One evening, he exploded in class and shouted "You ask us all of these stupid questions - when are you going to teach us something useful? You remind me of a stupid professor I had at the University of Minsk who asked me a stupid question on my Masters in Physics orals and because I couldn't answer it, I wasn't given my degree".
I asked him to recite the professor's question. The immigrant replied, "The question is so stupid that nobody can answer it." I persisted and finally the immigrant relented.
"The question", the immigrant continued, "was - How would you describe how a transistor works in terms that a Russian farmer could understand?" He then continued, "See, I told you it was a stupid question. How can someone answer such a question? Russian farmers are stupid - they don't even have a fifth grade education!"
I replied, "Thats an easy questions to answer." Then I answered it to the chagrin of the immigrant - who immediately acknowledged that I was right.