Nov 21 2008
An Interesting Twist
This morning, Gus - the second grader - woke up with a question on his mind: How many zeros in a billion? How the heck was I supposed to know? So we tried an experiment. I had made the suggestion to his teacher that he might be able to focus a little better during independent work if he had a laptop to work on, and I said I’d try letting him do some work on his own at home. This morning seemed to be as good a time as any. So we logged on to the Internet, I wrote down the question for him and told him how to do a web search. Our Kidzui search was fruitless, so I told him he could use the grownup Internet. Very exciting.
Sure enough, we found a site with the answers - more answers than we could have possibly even thought to ask for. It was like Christmas morning. We talked about why anyone would need to use such big numbers, and even a little about how scientists don’t bother writing all those zeros, but use a special way of writing how many there are (because you’re never too young to know about scientific notation). And that’s not even the most interesting thing to me, that my second grader now knows how many zeros there are in a quintillion.
At school, his behavior was different. He wasn’t bouncing off the walls, but instead was just zoning out in his own little world. It was such a pronounced difference that his teacher wrote me a long note about it. She seemed perplexed.
But I have a pretty good idea what he was thinking about. I’d be my last dollar that he was envisioning all those zeros in a centillion. Wouldn’t you?
If this website’s database would permit a billion entries of the phrase: “What a great idea!”, I would get to copy-and-pasting immediately!