By Charles Larrieu Casias

One of the cool things about math is that it can provide powerful new ways of seeing the world. Just for fun, I want you to open up this lesson from the grade 8 student text. Take a quick skim. What do you notice? What do you wonder?

When writing this lesson, I was guided by a few key questions:

1. To paraphrase Dan Meyer: If I want arithmetic with scientific notation to be the aspirin, then how do I create the headache?
2. What are some weird, silly comparisons involving really large numbers?
3. Here, towards the end of 8th grade, what should students be doing to transition towards the high school mathematical modeling cycle?

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