If you’ve ever taught math to students, you’ve probably taught some probability.
And usually, there’s simple activities like flipping a coin or rolling dice that help it make sense to the kids. I’d wager (see what I did there) that you can find some probability in the news headlines at least 7 days a week (maybe more!).
This week we had two very interesting bits of probability…and I shared both with my math class, even though we weren’t studying probability at this time. Why? Because they need to see that math is not just used during particular chapters, it’s used in everyday life.
1st…There was a family in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that just welcomed a baby boy to their family. How exciting is that probability? Maybe 3 % exciting. But if it was their 14th child, and every child has been a boy, that ranks about a 97% on the exciting scale. Now maybe you’re not so good at probability yourself, but everyone knows that’s a pretty rare occurrence. Because the probability of a boy is roughly 1/2, that makes the chance of having 14 boys in a row 1/2 to the power of 14…or 1/16384…wow! If you’re game, have your students try flipping a coin 14 times and try to get all heads. If you have a class of 25 students all trying to get 14 heads in a row, they’ll all probably have to try about 655 times for one of them to get it to happen!
(Incidentally, if one kid were to get 14 tails in a row, that’s the equivalent of a family getting 14 girls in a row in this situation, also a 1/16384 chance)
Read more about this family of 14 boys…
2nd…It was the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death on April 23. And it (likely) was also his birthday. What’s the probability of that happening? 1/365 you say? That’s what random chance would tell us, but a few years ago, some researchers (with nothing else to study) looked at this very occurance. They examined 25 million death records between 1998 & 2011 and found there’s a slightly higher chance of dying on your birthday than the average day. Like 6.7% higher chance. Why? Apparently sometimes some people do strange things on their birthday that are somewhat risky. Either way, it’s still probability and it’s still a fun way to get kids thinking.
Read more about chances of birth & death on same day…
Later everyone…I’ve got to head out and buy some lotto tickets.
