Ignorant Question

There are a couple of "standard responses" that come out of people upon learning that I teach deaf students:
"Oh wow, that's really interesting."
"So then do you know sign?" (so often I want to reply to that one with "Duh.")
"That's really good of you." (why is that exactly?")
"Really? Okay, this may be an ignorant question but..."

My favorites are the questions that show people's ignorance. Most often they're pretty benign questions, things about sign language or how I teach Deaf kids. Generally information one would not know without having some experience with the Deaf community. The other day though I got a question that actually caught me off guard: "how do Deaf children think?"

Say what?!?

Upon further discussion, it turned out that the underlying question really was, "if Deaf children can't speak, how do they think, because I think in the words that I speak." Well there's a loaded question!

Now I hate to sound judgemental, but there are some types of people I might expect that kind of question from. A seemingly well educated college professor and former teacher is NOT one of those people. Thus it was quite difficult for me to compose an answer to this nearly offensive, possibly condescending, clearly ignorant question implying that people who can't speak can't think (was he perhaps channelling Aristotle?).

Eventually I came up with an answer that seemed satisfactory. Having never been in a Deaf student's head I can't say that it was an accurate answer, but it appeared to be sufficient. Theoretically everyone walked away from the experience a little smarter. For certain it gave me a whole new perspective on the phrase, "Now this may show my ignorance but..."