I remember a commonplace I used to say after graduating from college with a humanities degree when people asked what I learned. “I learned how to learn,” I would say. The sentence made perfect sense to me as well as to my cohort of other humanities majors gathered around a bonfire out in some field while musicians plucked and hammered away somewhere nearby.
Much later, during the No Child Left Behind discussions, I would hear certain commentators and politicians calling for measurable accountability. “Students need to learn and be accountable—and so do their teachers. What does ‘learning how to learn’ even mean?” And I would pause in my chopping of cilantro to growl at them about being able to understand what one didn’t know and to develop a way to
address your own ignorance.
And now I have another idea. Though the cilantro has long since returned to earth.
When I played Keltis with my parents the other day, we were slowed down by a barrage of questions and uncertainties. So I went back over rules, strategies, and play choices as the game board was cautiously, tentatively developed. Slow going, but we ended on a good note.
The evening left me a little unsure about my choice for tonight: Settlers of Catan (yes, another SdJ winner) (photo by skell). The game’s a little more intricate than Keltis, more moving parts: roads, settlements, cities, development cards, resource management, dice, and the robber.
Here’s how it works: a sort of meta-hexagon—the island of Catan (photo by msaari)—is composed of a series of smaller hexagons, each of which offers a resources and is assigned a number between two and twelve. Each player rolls two dice, collects resources from hexes with that number (but only if they have a settlement or city on an intersection bordering that hex). Settlements, cities, development cards, largest army, and longest road yield victory points. First to ten wins.
We clicked along through the description with only a few distractions. The play moved along at a rate that suggested that we all knew what to do. Trading was good, the robber was deployed wisely, and my dad won by three.
Can you learn how to learn? Does experience beget literacy that begets quicker acquisition?
I’ll add two more details: We had a quick run through on the basics of Go, and after we played Settlers my dad and I started a game of San Juan. We both had three buildings up when my brother arrived from Chicago. So I’m inclined to think more about bootstrapping.
So it turns out that we didn’t buy a lot of games when I was a kid. We received them as gifts, mostly. Maybe one or two purchases, which would explain why I don’t remember us every buying them.
Tomorrow, we ramp up to Maharaja.
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