Blog Post 3

The children’s book I read was The King’s Chessboard by David Birch. This story is about a servant who outwits the king the kind of Decan. One day the wise servant man is called in by the king and the king asks, “What do you want as a reward” for his yeas of loyal service. The servant says, “Serving your majesty is reward in itself” the king then insists that the servant pick a reward and the servant insists that he does not need one. This goes on until the king becomes angry and says that if the servant doesn’t choice a reward he will wish he had. The servant thinks and says that his reward shall be that for the first day the first square on the the king’s chess board he will receive one grain of rise, for the second day and second square 2grains and so forth so that for each square the servant will receive twice the number of grains then the square before for every square on the board. The king agrees to this deal with the servant without calculating how much rise he will have to give the servant. Soon enough the wise servant is receiving bags upon bags on rise daily. Soon the royal granaries become almost empty and the king cannot supply the wise man any further. The king realizes that he has been outwitted and the wise servant agrees to end the rice agreement and makes a new one and continues to serve the king. This story used beautiful illustrations, cleaver word choice, and math to demonstrate that without using our wit and math we are sure to be outwitted even if we are powerful like a king.   

            The King’s Chessboard by David Birch demonstrates the way exponential growth can be used in real life and how understanding it is so important. The first day the servant only receives one piece of rise, the next two, then four, then eight, then 16, and so forth until the royal granaries are almost empty and the servant is receiving bags and bags of rise. The king believed that since there are sixty-four squares on the chessboard that he would own the servant only a pound of rice. The king is greatly mistaken and the number of grains of rise stats to grow rapidly which demonstrates exponential growth. This growth pattern is represented in the expression 2ⁿ where n is greater than or equal to zero.

            I think that literature especially children’s literature is a very effective way to teach and learn math. I believe this because literature gives students a visual representation of math in a way they haven’t been exposed to before. Students can become discourages with math because the idea of numbers can either be confusing or uninteresting to students. This is why literature is so important because it gives math a real world application and demonstrates that math is in the real world too and is more then just numbers you learn in class.