2/26/23, 9:08 PM Understanding Large Numbers - Rethinking Schools

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Understanding INCLUDED
Large Numbers IN:
By Bob Peterson

Volume 18, No.1

Fall 2003

SOURCE: War resisters league (www.warresisters.org) based on data from the

center for defense information

It’s a zillion!” calls out one student in response to my

question of how to read the number 1,000,000,000 I’ve

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written on the overhead. “No, it’s not, it’s a million,”

argues another.

Despite the fact that my fifth graders have been taught

place value throughout their elementary years, there is
something about big numbers that lends itself to
guessing. Perhaps it’s the omnipresent state lottery
advertisements that tend to blur big numbers together.
Or more likely it’s the fact that big numbers are just
difficult to read, much less understand. Imagining a
billion boggles my mind, whether I’m trying to fathom
that number of galaxies swirling around the universe or
the number of H 2 O molecules in a drop of water.

Kids are fascinated with big numbers, especially if they

connect with the real world. Thanks to the U.S.
government’s addiction to military spending, students
have an endless stream of large numbers to study. And
those numbers just get bigger and bigger! The growth in
the military budget comes as schools face massive
budget cuts. Teaching about these matters provides
students an opportunity to improve their understanding
of large numbers, and even more importantly,
understand the power of math in debates about the
future of our communities and world.

Before I delve into budget issues, I do a couple of

activities to help children put meaning behind place
value. This year, the night before I was to start my mini-
unit on big numbers and budgets, the students’
homework was to ask family members what they
thought one million and one billion meant. The next day
students shared responses. They ranged from the
precise “one million is one thousand thousands” to the
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comical “it’s what you get when you win the lottery,” to
the practical, “it’s enough money to buy everything we
ever need and still have some left over.”

I asked the students, “How many days equals a million

seconds? After some initial guesses, the students worked
in groups with calculators using different strategies to
solve the problem. Eventually they came up with about
11.8 days.

I then asked how long it would take for us to count to a

million. Some students suggested we just do it and time
ourselves. Others were more skeptical. After some
practice with six-digit numbers we estimated that it
would take, on the average, about two seconds a
number. Some more calcuation and the class realized it
would take a little over 23 days. “I’m not going to be
wasting my time doing that,” one student proclaimed.

To visualize a million I asked the students to look closely

at a strand of their hair and then I told them that if one
piled a million of those on top of each other it would
reach up to a seven story building. I also showed the
students the book How Much Is a Million? by David
Schwartz (Scholastic, 1985). Some of the pages are filled
with tiny stars — 14,364 per page. The book encourages
students to guess how many pages of stars it would take
to reach a million, and they are surprised to find it would
take 70 pages.

I then repeated some of these activities with a billion.

The students soon discovered that their calculators did
not go that high and so we did some whole-class work.
We calculated that one billion seconds equals about 32
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years. After timing the counting of a series of very large

numbers, we estimated it would take about three
seconds a number if we were to count to a billion —
leading us to conclude it would take almost 96 years to
count to a billion. We examined the star-filled pages
of How Much Is a Million? and calculated that it would
take 70,000 such pages!

Next I wrote $80,000,000,000 on the chalk board and

had a student read it. I then wrote the number
$10,000,000 and did the same. I had students guess the
numbers’ significance. I then explained to them that the
former is the estimated cost of war and occupation of
Iraq for a year, and the latter is approximately the
amount of money that is going to be spent renovating
and adding to our 100-year old building. I asked, “How
many schools like ours could get a major renovation for
the cost of just one year of the Iraqi war?” After a wide
range of guesses, I asked how we could know for sure.

The class decided that we’d go around the room

counting by 10 million and that Markese would keep
track of the number of school construction projects that
could be bought. As each student added another 10
million, Markese made a mark on a piece of paper. After
we went around the class two times, we had only
reached 460 million and it was clear our effort to count
to 80 billion was going to take a while. When we finally
reached 1 billion, Markese announced we could rebuild
100 schools. I stopped the counting and suggested the
students use mental math to figure out the final
solution. “8,000!” one student called out. “That’s a lot of
schools that could be rebuilt!” added another. “That’s
more than in all of Milwaukee!” added a third. In fact, a

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quick check on the Internet showed that there are just

over 2,000 public schools in Wisconsin.

Later, as part of this mini-unit, the students discussed

graphs from United for a Fair Economy (UFE) that
contrast the U.S. military budget with federal social
spending and also with military budgets of other
countries around the world. Using UFE’s data, students
figured out that one Stealth Bomber, at the cost of $2.1
billion, could have paid for the annual salary/benefits of
38,000 teachers. This was of extra significance to my
students because our school principal had just informed
their parents we’d be losing two teachers (gym and
music), half our librarian time, and two
paraprofessionals. “Just for a little part of one of those
bombers, we could have all our teachers back,” one
student said.

I did this unit at the very end of the school year in the
midst of news of mounting budget cuts and continuing
conflict in Iraq. I wanted to give my departing fifth-
graders a different perspective on the cuts. So often the
talk about budgets is filled with hopelessness and
inevitability. I knew that in just a few days we’d only
touch the surface of a complicated issue. Next school
year, I will cover this earlier so that we can spend more
time looking at how policymakers make budget
decisions, the relative merits of various types of
spending, and what social action groups are doing on
these issues.

Holding students’ attention during the waning days of

the school year is always a challenge. This lesson held
their attention, and it was a fitting way to end the school
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year as the students prepared to go to middle schools

that also faced drastic cuts.

“This really isn’t fair,” one student wrote when I asked

the class to reflect on the matter in their journals. “So
much money is being spent when our schools need so
little.” Actually our school — like most schools — needs a
lot. But it’s just a little compared to the more than $400
billion this nation spends each year on the military
budget.

Hmmm, I wonder how many schools that could rebuild .

. . and how many jobs that would create?

Bob Peterson ( repmilw@aol.com ) is an editor of Rethinking Schools and

teaches fifth grade at La Escuela Fratney in Milwaukee.

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