West Point Grey Academy definitely looked, felt, and smelled like privilege, although I am sure that whereas children of wealthy corporate and organized criminal types (I am not exaggerating or kidding!) probably pay full tuition, children of professors, teachers, and the like are on some kind of scholarship or student aid. Knowing how political and corporate elites have been conspiring together to gut public education, seeing the visible reminder of subsidized private education, at the higher end of scale at that, left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
Each group of students opted to run a game with theoretical probabilities configured such that the chance of winning (or at least scoring opportunities to retry) was either equal to the chance of losing, indicating a fair game, or strictly lower, indicating an unfair game.
I appreciated the practical lesson on deception in magic and carnival/funfair/amusement park games. For example, one group of students had a ball-throwing game where to "win", you had to hit the bull's eye... except the box was unevenly divided so that if your ball landed in the larger section, you lost anyway; to win, your ball needed to land in the smaller section of the box:
Another group of students had a draw-the-winning-ticket type game... except they purposely included more "din (lose)" tickets than "win" tickets in the draw.
For those who opted for a "spin-the-wheel" type game, there existed a group that purposefully gave bad draws larger sections on the circle:
Speaking of which, another group had a theoretically fair game whose implementation could potentially be disputed due to them not drawing the sections precisely enough. I pointed this out, considering that the circle appeared to have been freely drawn, without the aid of a ruler or a protractor; their insistence on its fairness was astounding and exasperating all at once. I would think that with a $20,000 tuition, you would at the very least be taught some metacognitive skills from a young age. For instance, the Harkness method at Phillips Exeter effectively drills those skills into you.
Thanks for these perceptive and interesting comments, Jongju! It is very interesting to see the class privilege operating at private schools -- although some of my highly-egalitarian former students have taken jobs at these schools at times when the public schools weren't hiring. (Many ended up at public schools once hiring started up again recently.) I will send part of your commentary to the teachers, but will take out the class critique as these teachers are well aware of the situation and must deal with it for as long as they teach at this school!
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