Magic: The Gathering

Greetings parents and families, 

As you have probably heard, our mini-theme for the last week and a half has been Magic: The Gathering (often abbreviated as M:TG). To say that it's been a popular area of study would be an understatement. We wanted to take a few moments to give you an idea of how the last few days have played out, and talk a little bit about what the kids are getting out of the experience. 

At the beginning of last week, most of the members of our class fell pretty squarely into one of two groups: People who were M:TG aficionados and knew all about it, and people who were only dimly aware of "Magic" as "that weird card game that a bunch of boys play at lunch every day." There were some fairly clear dividing lines on this: Most (but not all) of the girls in class didn't know much about it, and most (but not all) of the boys decidedly did. There was even a 50-50 split among the teachers: Sam has been playing for decades, and I (Jason) knew next to nothing about the game. 

At the end of the day on Monday, there were a few dejected faces. (Mine might have been one of them.) Magic feels a little dense when you're first exposed to it. It can be overwhelming to receive all of the rules and tropes in one large info dump. The general sense among those with dour faces was, "why are you making us learn this boygame?" I'd be concerned that I was projecting that attitude, were it not for the fact that I overheard people muttering, "my brother loves this game..." (The word "brother" was clearly being used as a pejorative.)

Before we get into the gender disparity involving general interest in the game, let's take a quick look at some of the skills that kids use when playing: 

There are a lot of rules and procedures. The ability to closely follow a set of rules and procedures is not necessarily a well developed skill during the middle school years. M:TG gets kids naturally invested in paying close attention to the rules, and carefully attending to detail. 

There's a lot of resource management. I won't go over the rules here, but suffice to say that different cards have radically different values depending on various circumstances. Colors play a big role in the game mechanics, and the most powerful cards can be essentially useless without the complementary cards to play them. 

This leads us to a big one: Making and executing a plan. Each player "builds" their deck for play. In class, we're only playing with cards that have been carefully curated by Sam (he edits some for content, some for skill level and complexity). Sam hands out starter decks with an essentially randomized set of cards. Kids then spend time evaluating what cards they have, then make a plan for the sort of deck that they'd like to construct. Kids learn a lot from experience here. They make predictions based on their growing body of experience, and start planning for multiple possible outcomes. 

Throughout all of this, they even learn a bit about bartering, economics, and scarcity, as well as the soft social skills involved with all of the above.  

We believe that these are all vital skills, worthy of targeted practice and development. 

We've also been creating our own cards,
which we'll eventually add to our decks.

This leads us to the gender imbalance when it comes to interest in the game. Many of our boys have been very invested in playing this game on their own. They play it on weekends, at lunch, in morning and aftercare, and during every free moment available. They've been doing it, in some cases, for years. They love it. And because they love it, they're getting a ton of extra practice in all of these life skills that are portable to other areas of life, perhaps most notably in Math and Science (there are some language arts components as well). We were excited about demystifying the game for the kids who had a (usually gender-related) bias against it, as there are a number of benefits to playing the game.  

By the end of our second day of working with the cards, the girls in our group had become intrigued, and by the third day, they were fully invested. Previously uninterested kids were showing up with decks that they had gotten on their own for play during free time. By the end of the week, playing Magic at lunch was no longer exclusively a "boy thing," and everyone who played did so as an eager equal. "I won my first game of Magic!" became a familiar refrain in the middle school. At one point, a male sibling from another class bounded up to Sam and marveled, "You got my sister interested in Magic! How did you do that??" 

It's been a fun area of study, and it's one that we hope to occasionally return to.