Humm, no he's very senior. Quite well published, etc. He just seems to...

Well you've heard the anecdote "when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail" many times I'm sure.
This fellow has a "hammer" (the style of instructional technology - my focus - he's been doing for years), and I have a "nail" (my thesis).
He is POSITIVE that his particular research, preexisting styles of research etc. apply to my particular work, which I hold is incorrect...

E.G. I am working with new technologies (specifically video games) as they apply to education, and how we can teach for/from/through them.
He feels, then that an Intelligent Tutor (an archaic, unused, poorly tested, 1980's concept) is tantamount if not equal to a modern gaming device.
When I try to explain to him that 29 years is an EON in technological terms, he rejects those assertions outright - as if that doesn't matter.

Hello all,

I'm sure you're as frustrated with your life right now as I am, I suppose I'll just get to the questions.

Why - WHY - does my supervisor insist on asking vague questions, shooting down almost deliberately all of my ideas, being vague and tangential, and just basically removing any motivation I had to get my degree done? I arrived here last September with as much "gumption" as one can potentially have, and in 5 months I feel like I've made completely the wrong choices in life.

All this man does is ask questions like "can you support that?" "what do you mean by X" where X is any word in the English language, which is then followed by the first question. Furthermore, he shoots down scholars left right and centre in a discipline in which he's done little/no reading, draws parallels between his discipline and mine (interdisc. PHD) that make no sense, and disagrees with me when I tell him so.

Further, in his papers, he asks unclear questions, prompts for exposition on things with no direction, and just generally makes me feel like I'm wasting a lot of time (and even more money).

Does anyone have any suggestions? Is it NORMAL for Ph.D. supervisors to be the most unhelpful people in the world?

Cheers