Catholic Schoolgirls Taught Gambling by Math Teacher

He defended exposing minors to gambling techniques, pointing out that the girls were quick to pick up on the likelihood of gambling leading to losing.

Australia has long been a country ambivalent about gambling, with players exhibiting a fervor that has led to a powerful backlash with a well-organized opposition to legal wagering. The strength of the debate seems likely to only worsen as a private college math teacher is using casino games to instruct students.

Jim Dooley, math teacher at Mount St. Michaels College in Brisbane, used an excursion to the racetrack at Doomben to help his 16- and 17-year-old students learn about risk management and returns on investment. The girls from the Catholic school were each given an imaginary budget of $50, and told to bet it.

Dooley plans to use casino games such as blackjack and roulette as future aids in his course. He defended exposing minors to gambling techniques, pointing out that the girls were quick to pick up on the likelihood of gambling leading to losing.

However, the president of the Brisbane branch of the Australian Family Association, Mark Holzworth, denied any value in Dooley's lesson plan. In a policy which must be axiomatic to calling oneself a family-based organization worldwide, he called for students to be shielded from exposure to gambling.

Even though statistics in the country show Australian students in teenage years gambling at about a 10%rate, half of which were problem gamblers, Holzworth preferred the ostrich technique of dealing with the issue, a stance which it is suspected he shares on the subjects of teenage pregnancy and drug usage.