When informed that Taylor Swift is now a billionaire, not a mere multi-millionaire, I hatched a plan to "make math fun" by fashioning a lesson around the difference between a million and a billion. The calculation we ran through related to time, seconds to be precise:
seconds in a day: 60 x 60 x 24 = 86,400
seconds in a week: 86,400 x 7 = 604,800
seconds in 12 days: 86,400 x 12 = 1,036,800
seconds in a year: 86,400 x 365 = 31,536,000
seconds in ten years: 31,536,000 x 10 = 315,360,000
seconds in thirty years: 315,360,000 x 3 = 946,080,000 (we're finally getting sort of close to a billion)
seconds in thirty-two years: 31,536,000 x 32 = 1,009,152,000
This shows, I told my fifth graders, that if they had a million dollars, and they spent a dollar every second, they'd be out of money in less than two weeks. But if they had Taylor Swift money, a cool billion, they could then spend a dollar a second for over 30 years before beginning to "run low."
I had given my phone to one of them so that she could use the calculator to generate the figures set out above. At what I considered to be the climax of the lesson, I said that a billion was almost too big to comprehend, and isn't it fun to try and fathom what "a thousand million" actually represents? By this time, though, she had moved on from the calculator to my camera roll. "Is this your dog?" she said.
They all clamored to see my dog, and I didn't disappoint. I have about a million pics of him.
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