Captivated – what a wonderful word. To be completely seized by curiosity. For instance, sitting in on an invigilated German reading test and suddenly noticing that, with the current little wave of illness going around, there is an awful lot of sniffling. And as any good scientist worth their salt, you feel the urge to start measuring…
So, to work. I tallied the number of sniffles for one minute at a time, at five-minute intervals. To cancel out any effect of my position in the room – and to keep at least some eye out for cheating – I moved to a different spot after each count. A clear definition is of course essential: I counted only sounds that resembled sniffling up through the nose. Other forms of nose-related noise, blowing, throat-clearing, coughing, sneezing, sighing or heavy breathing were excluded. I feel confident in assuming that the number of sniffles is roughly proportional to mucus production; for the other sounds I cannot say that with any certainty. After a peak at the start, the number of sniffles remained in the low twenties throughout the entire first half-hour. That works out, on average, to one sniffle per pupil per minute!
Then question two: who is doing the sniffling?
After the first pupil left, I kept track per person of what had happened beforehand: either the pupil had been heard sniffling, or the pupil had finished their test and left the room. Not entirely rigorous, of course, since my impression of a pupil’s runny nose was inevitably influenced by how quickly they read and worked through the German paper. The number of pupils I heard sniffling before they left was seven. Assuming the total across the whole class was ten, then 50 per cent of the pupils in this class had a runny nose – and a fourth-year pupil with a runny nose sniffles, on average, just over twice a minute. And to think that we already see above-average absenteeism during exam weeks…
This is the first instalment of the column Field Observations, successor to Cynthia Levering’s column Proeflokaal. Reinder Bosman (1997) teaches biology and research & design at the Goois Lyceum in Bussum. He will be sharing his experiences in and around his classroom here from now on.
