You may know her from the fun, popular songs that many of us sang growing up, but Cath Bee was back in school teaching the intermediates about a more serious side affect if you listen to your music too loudly.

There are about 15000 hairs in each of our ears and once they have been damaged they literally fall down and never get back up.  This damage can cause hearing loss and potentially lead to other hearing issues. Kath explained to us about how decibels can be dangerous if they are too high.  We also learnt that the ear has the smallest  bones in the body with the smallest being the stirrup.

This from Luke VE:

She showed us the anatomy of an ear and what lets you hear is actually 16,000 little hairs. Then Kath showed us the decibel system and how long you can safely listen to higher amounts of decibels. After that she made us group up,  handed out a tuning fork to each group and we found out all the cool things we could do with it.

We are all now aware of protecting our ears especially when listening to music, using power tools or if we are close to a lot of loud noise.  We can wear ear plugs or ear muffs and also do sensible things like turning music down or removing ourselves if somewhere is just too loud.