Mount St Michaels College, a Brisbane Catholic Girls School under the care of the Sisters of Charity, has adopted a novel approach to teaching mathematics.
It’s teaching the girls about punting on the races and at the casino.
This has sparked a moral panic from predictable quarters, as the linked article reports. However, if you’ll pardon the pun, I think the school is on a good thing and should stick to it.
The school’s head of maths states that:
“Part of the Queensland curriculum for mathematics for all students who are doing pre-voc [pre-vocational] maths, which is the group of students to whom you are referring, or indeed students who are doing the numeracy course, is to equip them with information about the dangers of gambling,” she said.
“How the odds are stacked in favour of the gambling institutions and how easy it is for them to lose money.”
There are reports that the students were given an imaginary $50 to spend at the racetrack.
“I can’t comment on that, I’m not sure, but if that had been done then that would be a very sensible way for them to get an idea of how quickly money can be lost,” Ms Towler said.
“We do other things as well. For example, we get them to look at the probabilities of the various poker hands … of course, working out the probabilities of getting various poker hands is quite complex.”
Ms. Towler is right. One of the most straightforward ways to disabuse people of the notion that gambling is a way to get ahead financially is to equip them with an understanding of basic mathematical and statistical realities, in particular that gambling games, and punting on the races, are set up in such a way that the aggregate amount returned to winning punters is always substantially less than the aggregate amount wagered, so that in the long run everyone is overwhelmingly likely to lose a percentage of what they bet roughly equal to the “take” of the gambling house, the bookmaker or the tote agency. The solution, as Keynes pointed out, is only to bet what you can afford to lose for the sake of entertainment.
This is not the first example I’ve read about creative use of horseplay as an educational tool. Apparently some innovative literacy teachers have found that, for some people, getting them to read and understand racing formguides is a better bet (ouch!) than more conventional means of teaching reading skills.
This is also my cue to offer my first tip for the Melbourne Cup, for which first nominations closed earlier this week. All recent experience suggests that the winner of the race will almost certainly come from one of the following three categories of horses:
* British and Irish horses;
* Japanese horses;
* horses whose father is thet bug stellion from ecross the dutch, Zabeel.
If you can identify the horses in these three categories, your task of picking the Cup winner will be greatly simplified.
Paul Norton, a post after my own heart. Rumours are the Japanese horse won’t be coming due to the quarantine regulations. My early Cups double is Weekend Hussler into Efficent. Efficient is at 12s on IAS, so sling a lazy hundred there. And of course, he’s by Zabeel.
I rarely punt now, but I started when I was about 5 years old and was successful into my teens, to such an extent that my primary school teachers used to ask me for tips. It was all pure dumb luck. When I was dux of my primary school I was given a year’s subsciption to ‘Racehorse’ magazine as a proze. Very un-PC. I gave up punting on my fifteenth birthday because I was sick of losing my pocket money. But I always have a couple of bets during the Spring and they’ve financed overseas trips in the past. I’ll give odds now that there’ll be couple of St. Michaels girls who do well and become hooked.
enny meths teacher wull till you thet punting und the casino are uxcellunt wheys of gettung thus message across, Lotto tuckets too. A meths teacher could do quite a but of social good by gettung hus or her pupils to understand
* odds un racing
* Govt taxes
* casino owner take
Un fect, the meths of probabulity started with some geezer un Europe workung out the chances in gamblung games enny-whey. Pascal p’raps. I wuddn’t wager on ut, eh.
So these young misses might learn about the downside of the neddies.
But you wudden take it much further, you jokers, eh? They don’t need to do work experience in a house of ull repute to understand nasty diseases and nasty customers, OK?
Teaching probability through gaming is one of the most useful things a mathematics education can do. Every person who uses numbers should know Pascal’s triangle and know something of the history of statistics, which developed from people wanting to know the odds at cards, dice and coins.
Add up the total probability of the odds at the Tote. The last time I did this, it was 1.46. It’s probably different now. Wanna bet?
Compare the odds you calculate with your gut feel. Update the odds with new information. Known unknowns become known knowns. Learn about uncertainty - perfect for an uncertain world.
The girls and St Michaels can then go on to examine the recent assumptions
here, here, and here on the odds of God.
As the Chinese would say, we can teach you to gamble but we won’t teach you Tibet.
Go girls, go.
An RC high school teaching students gambling: its mathematics, ethics, pros & cons. Shock!!! Horror!!! Who’d ever have thought it?
Ah! The irony of - dramatic or otherwise- of teaching, it. (I’ve been giggling since I saw it on TV yesterday.)
From the mid-late C19, most Oz towns (except the smallest) and suburbs built RC schools and residences for the nuns, brothers and fathers.
Until Gough started to splashing out the cash to private (mainly RC) schools, what was The Micks’ main fund-raising strategy - given cheap school-fees hardly fed the schools’ teaching nuns, brothers & fathers? How indeed, could the RCs finance Brisbane’s Mater Mothers and other hospitals? The DeLaSalle & Brigidene Colleges Redcliffe? Boys’ Town?
Sure there were fetes, balls, sports days tuckshops & other fundraisers; but there were small bikkies, nothing like the fundraisers needed unless … If you are/ know RCs from the pre-Gough days (tho I hear things haven’t changed all that much) you know what fills in the space.
Mind you, tongues did almost rip through cheeks during “The morals and pitfalls of gambling” lectures, and some of the equivocation would have turned a Tudor Era Jesuit green with envy; but that didn’t stop the “contextualisation” of permutations combinations & stats that made their mathematics crystal clear … I learned mine from the child/ sibling of race-horse owners (one of them a priest who rarely missed a Brisbane race).
A plague on wussiness!
I always understood Catholics were supposed to prefer gambling to sex. From what I remember, it didn’t even qualify as a sin, so long as you didn’t steal money to do it. Good on ‘em.
Its a story pretty close to my heart too. Gambling and the catholic church go hand in hand in this one as well…
I took up gambling at about 13 after being chauffered to the Moonee Valley trots by a catholic priest after altar-boying for him at Saturday evening mass (with my mother’s permission - clearly it was some years ago…). His tip in the third was a goody and my $3.15 return on 50c each way got me on my way - swiftly downhill, as your observations about odds could have told me had I paid more attention in maths.
It continued into Year 12 at a prominent Melb catholic boys college (I hadn’t gotten sick enough of losing my paper-round money yet - slow learner). Together with a posse of other wayward lads and the Year 12 co-ordinator (also the Pure Maths teacher), we’d attend to a reasonably complicated mathematical system of rating a horse’s run based on inputs like track condition, lengths from the winner, etc. Each Monday morning we’d check each other’s calculations and slate the horses we’d follow on that basis.
I probably honed my mathematical capabilities substantially through the process but I’d say the girls at Mt St Michaels will be getting a far more useful insight into the neddies from their catholic maths education… All power to ‘em.
Let’s be fair. We’re dealing with wusses, but not superwusses:
So why not do both stock market investment and gambling? Although these days it’s hard to tell the difference. (See Enron, sub-prime mortgages, ANZ, etc…)
Ergo the Rythm Method.
I think it would be very educational for both these to be used as examples, so people learn the difference between investing and gambling. This isn’t new though? We used card games as examples for probability at high school.
I sort of like the idea of teaching probability this way, in fact in a less confronting way, this was the way I was taught probability. Considerable numbers of mathematics books have coin tosses and card decks as examples in probability, taking it to a race track is an obvious extension of this. So properly supervised this is no worse then the textbook.
Plus it has an advantage, debunking the ‘gamblers’ bias. You know the one, that if you have an event with a known set of outcomes and a known probability for each outcome, there is a perception that previous results over/under representing that probability are more/less likely to occur, for example throwing 4 heads in a row in a coin toss, then expecting that the probability of a tails coming up is bigger because it’s ‘due’ to come up. This one is epically bad on things like two-up, craps, roulette, virtually any card game and our old favourite slot machines. And anything that shows that bias for what it is good in my opinion.
PinkyOz
It was a probably a bunch of sour old methodists who complained about it. Or some of K Rudd’s mates. [Why aren’t methodists allowed to have sex standing up? - Because it could lead to dancing]
Going the punt has been a long standing irish catholic tradition and the sisters are to be commended for encouraging the lasses to understand the track. They need to go further a revive the fast diminishing tradition of the parish priest owning a hay burner in partnership with some locals. Might even increase vocations.
But of course there are people who make a living out of betting on the horses. Horse races aren’t random events. Some horses run faster then others. Where the mathematics comes in for the succesful punter is that they calculate the price that they think each horse should be in a race and then they back the horses who are over the odds. If you just rely on picking winners, you will always lose over the long term, because you will back too many short priced winners who won’t cover the cost of your losses. I’ve never had the skill or patience for this method. Hence, I rarely bet.
paul - with the Melbourne Cup - if you want to be sensible back the 4 favourites for a place, or less sensible, each way. If you want to have fun slap $100 on the nose of your gut feel for a win and $50 on the longest odds horse for a place. If you want to increase the fun slap it on in cash with an on-course bookie and retire to the bar.
If you want to be an authentic australian and keep the traditions alive then borrow the $ off your employer in advance of next weeks wages or collect a long standing debt off an old mate and go down to your local SP bookie in the last barbershop left standing and sling him the used readies folded up in the Sporting Globe.
Fine opined: “But of course there are people who make a living out of betting on the horses. ”
Of course there are: bookies, racing officials, jockeys, breeders, TAB persons, and sports journalists.
Ambi, you old cynic. You might also want to include the trainers.
I went to Mt. St. Michael’s College, graduating in 2000, before the reign of the current Principal Alison Terry. I’ve long bemoaned that I never learnt how to stick to a budget or trade shares in maths class, yet I missed gambling at the races!
I’m disgusted by this mainly because all of the middle class bitches … errr, young women (scarred by all girls Catholic School much? me?) I went to school with at Mt. St. Michael’s College LOVE going to The Races. The Races is the ultimate day out for girls who go to school like this, and judging by all the photos of them in their race day best on Facebook, it hasn’t become any less fashionable since I was at school. If your school fees fund an excursion to the races, all the better to prepare you for this thrilling social event of drinking and gambling as an adult.
Heh! I wondered about that. When I was a kiddy, going to the races was something for weird old blokes in hats. High school students and uni kids wouldn’t have been caught dead at the track. Some smart marketing by the racing authorities in the 90s - and, hey presto, it’s bigger than champers at Ballymore for the private school set!
Having said that (by way of observation not condemnation), I like the stories about Catholicism and gambling. I went to a funeral once conducted by a “racing priest” and everyone felt compelled to point out this fact. And then, since Roger mentioned Pascal, he had a rather famous Wager too.
Personally, I don’t see there being all that big of an issue here. This is a very creative way of teaching probability, I must say! Furthermore, the studies are being presented in one of the more common fashions in which young people will actually encounter probability at work, fitting with the objective of pre-vocational maths (to teach stuff that will be of discernible use in their everyday lives).
Furthermore, whilst earlier canon law took a dim view of gambling, in recent centuries, the Church has been more tolerant of such business, provided that it’s fair and done in moderation. To quote the Catechism directly…
“Games of chance (card games, etc.) or wagers are not in themselves contrary to justice. They become morally unacceptable when they deprive someone of what is necessary to provide for his needs and those of others. The passion for gambling risks becoming an enslavement. Unfair wagers and cheating at games constitute grave matter, unless the damage inflicted is so slight that the one who suffers it cannot reasonably consider it significant.” -Article 2413, for the curious.
Yes, the outcry is to be expected. However, (as many people here have aptly pointed out) the teachers are getting kids to consider the science of probability in an interesting, real-life fashion, whilst highlighting the risks and issues surrounding it. In my humble opinion, game on!
(PS: this is my first time commenting here. Pleasure to meet you all!)
Thanks for commenting, Mark!
I just wanted to make a quick apology to anyone whose comment has been held up because of moderation. Because of the subject a lot of spam comments discuss, a lot of words relating to gaming and wagering trigger the filter - quite inadvertently in this instance.
Clearly, these young Catholic schoolgirls should take advice from that wisest of Catholics, Hilaire Belloc:
Lord Hippo suffered fearful loss
By putting money on a horse
Which he believed, if it were pressed,
Would run far faster than the rest;
For someone who was in the know
Had confidently told him so.
But on the morning of the race,
It only took the seventh place!
Picture the Viscount’s great surprise!
He scarcely could believe his eyes!
He sought the the Individual
Who had laid him odds at nine-to-two,
Suggesting as a useful tip
That they should enter partnership
And put to joint account the debt
Arising from his foolish bet.
But when the bookie - oh! my word!
I only wish you could have heard
The way he roared he did not think,
And hoped that they might strike him pink!
Lord Hippo simply turned and ran
From this infuriated man.
Despairing, maddened and distraught,
He utterly collapsed and sought
His sire, comma, the Earl of Potamus,
And brokenly addressed him thus:
“Dread sire - today - at Ascot - I…”
His genial parent made reply:
“Come! Come! Come! Come! Don’t look so glum!
Trust your papa and name the sum…
WHAT… fifteen hundred thousand?… HUM!
However, stiffen up you wreck;
Boys will be boys - so here’s the cheque!”
Lord Hippo, feeling deeply - well,
More grateful than he cared to tell -
Punted the lot on Little Nel: -
And got a telegram at dinner
To say…
……….. that he had backed the Winner!
I just got my tax return! Any tips?
laura, stick with Efficent. There’s also another Zabeel horse who ran well first up yesterday - Zagreb. He might be value for money and he’s trained by David Hayes,who knows how to train stayers right.
If you really wanna piss your cat off say that three times close to her face.
An old joke.
Catholic Punter #1: “Our Father which art in Heaven, let the last race be won by Horse Number Seven.”
Catholic Punter #2: “Hail Mary, full of grace! Let Horse Number Seven finish in first place.”
The race is then run. A voice from above says: “This is the voice of the Holy Ghost. Horse Number Seven got left at the post.”