Large-scale counting is awful. It's tedious, and mostly unnecessary busywork If you need to consistently count something over a hundred, you should probably be using tally marks or a clicker. There's a reason every stopwatch has a built-in lap counter. Still, speed matters, and it often isn't worth the effort to pull something out.
If you need to count many of something and track verbally, count in fives. One two three four five two two three four five three two three four five...and so on.
Why?
Counting full numbers is slow and counting in tens leaves exactly enough time between to forget which tens you were on. It's bad enough without risking forgetting your place and being forced to restart.
When you finish, halve the last five count, multiply by ten, and add on the stragglers. For example, if you ended on seven two three, that's 7/2 = 3.5 * 10 = 35 + 3 = 38. It sounds more complicated than it is. This isn't exactly how I do the mental math; we all have our own little tricks. As long as you have your halves down, it's essentially instant.
Works physically too, five is about the most you can visually pick out of a pile without counting. You can count quite fast by pulling out clusters of five at a time and only tracking the number of clusters (plus any leftovers). Comes up oddly more often than you would think.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
Perhaps a mundane application of music as math, but I suppose it counts.
There's a minor effect where once it's easier to count things, you start counting them more. I definitely count more things in the couple dozen range than I used to, simply because I know it's quick enough and I'm curious. "How many snacks are left in this box?" sorts of questions.
Whether I've gotten any real benefit out of that is questionable, so maybe I was better off counting slower and therefore counting less things. Hard to say.
If nothing else, I think counting in fives is more fun. Gets me thinking of music and rhythm instead of how silly English number words are.
- Rew