If you allowed your pupils to rove freely round the classroom, how difficult would it be to keep track of where they were? Imagine that at the end of a few seconds, they were converted into identical, featureless statues. How many of them could you name?

A recent article in the New Scientist Latest Headlines Blog suggests that the answer might be around 8. There are tests you can try here with clear instructions of what to do, how to do it and what to notice.

This called to mind a TV programme (was it Horizon?) a few years ago featuring a chimp called AI who showed what seemed like amazing numeracy. The evolution of this skill was explained in terms of its usefulness in a dust up with a neighbouring troop and the need to know who’s got your back. Any PE teacher or team sports player will have an experiential knowledge of this concept. There are impressive video clips of AI performing tasks of numeracy and ordinality here, although those opposed to animal testing, even in its most benign forms, may prefer to avoid this. They feature: Dot Counting; Numerical Ordering; Numerical Memory Span & Color-Kanji Recognition (AI’s hand tends to obstruct the view of sample in this film). Still, if you ever fancied learning Japanese but thought it might be too difficult, this might be a prompt.

With regard to music, anyone who has ever watched a skilled pianist or church organist sight-read will no doubt have marvelled at how they not only keep track of forests of notes but manage to activate them at the correct time and sustain them for the correct duration. Although not an up-tempo number, the folowing YouTube video features a few other features of organ technique:

• a densely packed musical score (three simultaneous lines for one person - notice that the top two each contain two independent musical parts - effectively making this solo a quintet in processing terms)
• finger substitution - where one finger, currently holding down a note, is relieved by another so it can move to its next target
• nifty footwork on the pedals
• note - the mirror placed to the oeft of the keyboard. Although not used in this particular performance, it would present one more tracking demand on the player, if there were a choir with a conductor present.

Incidentally, if I were a betting man, in a pupil tracking competition my money would be on primary teachers then secondary teachers of the more mobile subjects e.g. PE, Drama, CDT, HE, Art and class Music - where pupils are often scattered throughout a suite of rooms. And - let’s not forget excursions of all kinds!

Categories: Mathematics, Music, Science, Video