I remember in elementary school once we did a whole bunch of excercises in estimation. One that sticks out is beingaskes to open a closed dictionary to a particular letter section. I thought these were really stupid, but now realize that people are often horrible at common sense things that come down to reasonable (or totally unreasonable) estimation.

I doubt that more time flipping through dictionaries would have helped much, but I’ve never thought schools put enough emphasis on basic common sense. Maybe this would be a good happy median for the educators among us.