I was in the music shop a couple of weeks ago, listening to another customer explaining to the 2 young men behind the counter that she wanted ensemble arrangements for Happy Birthday. First she asked what key the clarinet sheet music should be written in if the other instruments are playing the key of C Major. (A fair question, since clarinets, I think, are B-flat instruments.) Then she asked what key the cello plays in. The young men scratched their heads and couldn't answer.

I wanted to reply with the punch line of the following joke:

Q: What do you feed a 200lb budgerigar? A: Anything it #$%@! wants.


MarkS,

Your story reminds me of when I worked in a public library and a man came in to find a book on a specific subject. He possibly had never been in a library before.

After asking what he was looking for I walked down the length of the library to find the section where those books were shelved. As I was walking I was mentally reminding myself of the specific Dewey Decimal Number that the book would be shelved under, and looking at the shelves to find the right section. I went straight for the shelf I needed, reached up, pulled a relevant book from the shelf and as I handed it to him he looked at me in total awe and said, "How did you do that?" I said, "Magic!" (But then I explained about the numbering system and the categories.)

To him it must have looked like I just reached at random for any book and happened to pick the right one first time.

(A note about calculating numbers: when I was teaching at a TAFE (in Oz - post-school college where people go to upgrade their school qualifications or to learn vocational and/or technical skills) I was pleased to see that in the numeracy classes the teacher made a point of teaching "guestimating" i.e. doing a quick mental calculation to get a rough idea of the likely answer, to double check the calculators or cash registers.

Helen