I'm a teacher.

I'll let you all Absorb that for a moment, as it implies a whole lot about me that's both true and not, that both defines me and leads to anticipations of a pedantic tone that serves only to assert my apparent and selfsame superiority.

Now that you have that picture in your head, allow me to tear it apart like a 9-year old with a Renaissance Faire turkey leg.

I'm a kid at heart, and I always will be. I'm a teacher (and have been for upwards of five years now) because I love interacting with kids on an intellectual level. I love helping people move toward that "aha" of discovery, and I relish in watching as a sweeping sense of recognition contorts someone's face, arching their eyebrows and straightening their spine. I believe that everyone can learn, and I love helping each student who walks into my classroom to find their unique path through the academic jungle.

Magic fits into this in a very interesting way. Actually, let me stop here and provide a tidy little disclaimer: I shall not use this article as a platform to try to "teach" you fine readers about Magic, life, the English Language, or any other erudite pursuits, so you can stop worrying. I will, however, use this article to butter you all up by calling you "fine readers." I'm far from above that.

Back to the action. Magic is a passion that I place alongside teaching as being a very key part of who I am and who I want to always be. I love to play at whatever level I can: I draft at FNMs, I play casually with friends, and I even play the occasional Grand Prix, PTQ, or even Pro Tour that comes my way. However, it is sometimes difficult for me to relegate tasks in a way that allows Magic to maintain its spot toward the top of my priorities list. I have installed, uninstalled, and reinstalled Magic Online so many times that my computer lets out a robotic sigh every time my mouse cursor double clicks on the MtGO icon. I find myself Jonesing for the game when I go without it for a while. When I go a month without playing at all, babies crawl across my ceiling and twist their heads 180 degrees to gawk at me. Yeah, it's intense.

However, I always return to the game. Over the past year or so, as I work my way toward tenure at my high school, I have come to the wonderful conclusion that I nor anyone or anything in this world can successfully cast Revoke Existence on my love for the game. Insert "Lethal Weapon 2" or "Family Guy" reference here.

Because of this, I have had time to Ponder how the dichotomy of priorities atop my list meld with one another. Teaching is a skill that few ever master, as the philosophy surrounding it is ever evolving. There is, however, a great deal of rhetoric used within it, and as I sat one day thinking about it, as most nerds in academia with too much free time and a tendency to overthink the simplest of circumstances like me often find themselves doing, I realized that much of the current philosophy behind good teaching applies quite well to the world of Magic: the Gathering.

I will now regale you with my thoughts on how three important educational ideals fit within the Magic player's universe. To Channel Heath Ledger's Joker for a moment, allow me to say, "and here...we...go!"

Differentiation

In education, differentiation is the practice of molding lessons and activities in a way that allows students of all different backgrounds and educational preferences to complete them successfully. For example, if Billy loves to write but couldn't draw a homunculus for his life, while Jenny loves to draw homunculi (yeah, I went there...) but couldn't write a sentence about them if her life depended on it, blindly assigning an essay about how the modern homunculus fits into society would almost guarantee Billy's success while dooming Jenny to failure. I could easily differentiate this assignment by instead allowing the students to respond to the prompt how they choose, inviting Jenny to create a storyboard that displays homunculi being sneaky and whatnot, while Billy can still wax poetic in written form.

Magic has more iterations than Lady Gaga has hats (or so I've heard...). Any given Friday at the local game store I attend, you can find players battling with their awkward generals in a multiplayer EDH game, playing Vintage while 8-year olds stare in Wonder at the Black Lotus that has been unceremoniously sacrificed to play a Trinisphere, drafting the latest set, playtesting Standard, or even engaging in a healthy pack war (Novablast Wurm is some good in that format). Sure, the FNM is technically scheduled as a DCI sanctioned draft, but everyone plays Magic for different reasons, in different ways, and with different strategies in mind. I am primarily a limited player, but every now and again, I get the itch to plop down an Aura Shards and chain Summoner's Egg into one another, only to end up with something like a Tangle Asp.

Magic is naturally differentiated. In any given playgroup, during any given play session, people can find themselves playing any of a number of different formats, all in the name of enjoying the game for all it has to offer. Sure, not all formats are created equally, as some are tournament fodder while others will forever remain unsupported by the mighty DCI at the side tables. However, regardless of your preferences, every player is equal, regardless of their play preferences, and there are outlets for all manners of zaniness as long as a player has the gumption to look. It matters very little whether you're primarily a limited player, like me, or if you're one of those weirdo constructed aficionados; the game is meant for all of us, and it accommodates us equally.

For the record, though, limited is the best format. Just kidding. (Not really...)

Skills vs. Content

In high school, I was always very good at interpreting stuff. Give me one of Shakespeare's masterpieces, and I could figure out character motivations, determine the eventual origin of Shylock's pound of flesh (it's his left thigh), or even tell how many pints of ale Falstaff had downed by the end of Act III (sixteen). However, in the end, this content means very little. You see, in school kids learn a metric ton of what I like to call "stuff." They learn when the battle of Hastings occurred (I still remember the year 1066, even if I have no clue what the heck Hastings is), what scientist discovered the quark (I think it was Gene Roddenberry...nothing like a Deep Space Nine reference in a Magic article, eh?), and even how much wood a woodchuck could chuck if it could somehow chuck wood. All of this "stuff" has no real value. What really matters is what you can actually do with the "stuff," or skills. Unless you're either writing a book or appearing on Jeopardy, the ability to actually interpret, write about, analyze, criticize, summarize, or just use this "stuff" is what makes all the difference. We all will encounter billions of kinds of "stuff" in our lifetimes; becoming better able to engage it one way or another is the real value of education.

In Magic, new sets come out regularly. I started playing when Revised was the newest set, and I've played on and off since. The game has changed immensely over this span, from significant rules changes, to myriad new mechanics and abilities, even to new keywords for old abilities. This is the content of Magic. The card pool is absolutely enormous, and formats change as sets rotate in and out. I was really comfortable playing red/blue/black Nether Go back in Mercadian Masques/Invasion block Standard, but when Masques block rotated, I lost my beloved 2/2 win condition. Were I not able to use the general skills necessary to play the game, such as basic card evaluation (Chimney Imp sucks, Psychatog rules), use of game mechanics, and understanding and application of concepts such as land-to-spell ratios, threat density, and card advantage, I would be up the River of Tears without a War Barge. Being able to apply known concepts and skills to unknown formats is what makes a Magic player "good."

This is not to say that the "stuff" in Magic, the individual sets, blocks, and mechanics, are unimportant. They help add to the diversity of the game in the same way that knowing all of that junk about the Battle of Hastings, quarks, and woodchuck athletic habits helps enrich our minds. For example, my friend Brad and I were building extended decks to test for Pro Tour Austin, and we trawled Gatherer on the mothership site to find the best possible technology to succeed in the Extended portion of the tournament. In spite of this, Inspiration struck more often when we simply sat and chatted about the format and about decks and archetypes. The "stuff" helped us tune to the point at which we were comfortable with what we brought to the table for round 1.

And for the record, Martyr was a great choice.

Learning as a Lifelong Process

I consider myself to be a lifelong learner. I am an English teacher, and I like to think I'm pretty good at both teaching children and employing the English language, but I'd be a fool to think that I have no room for improvement in both areas. Education is not an endeavor that takes place solely inside a school's walls or during class time. I learn every day, at any given hour, and I try to push my students to see that they do as well. Sure, sometimes the learning is about why, exactly, Claude Julien thinks it's in the Bruins' best interest to start Tuukka Rask instead of Tim Thomas this year (he's nuts), but more often it comes in the form of self awareness and worldly knowledge. I learned three days ago that I can easily fall asleep while resting my head on my wife's tummy. This is not only sickeningly sentimental (enjoy your emotional diabetes), but it's important to me because of how it reassures me of the comfort I gain from my wife.

I started playing Magic socially by playing Type 2 at local tournaments on Saturdays. I always played blue-based control decks. The first deck I brought there was a mono blue deck that abused the interaction between Parallax Tide and Ankh of Mishra. Sure, I tossed everything good I could trade for in the pile, including a Morphling I didn't know how to play correctly and the Masticore I always forgot to feed during my upkeep, but my affinity for control decks was set in stone. As I played more tournaments, I learned more and more about the game, and even though I stuck with blue control for the most part (Ankh/Tide...Nether Go...Psychatog...U/W control), my creatures started dying a lot less. I began to bluff. I stopped countering pointless spells (turn 8 Birds of Paradise? I think not; Undermine!). I even hit a point at which I realized that playing an aggressive deck every now and again would throw the metagame off a bit and would confuse my usual opponents at the store. I threw together Fires back when it was the deck of the day and swept through a couple tournaments. I evolved, and I found more success as I went.

Now I see new and old cards alike, and I try to think of how I could abuse them in all kinds of formats. The first time I saw Clone Shell, I immediately thought of both its limited playability and how hilarious it would be to chain it alongside Summoner's Egg in Dave's casual deck. This is a Seth that did not exist five years ago. I am learning more about both the game and myself as a player every single day, and it's both exhilarating and motivational.

All of this jargon almost certainly means more to me than it does to any of you. If you're still in school, there's a good chance you never think of these three concepts, nor of how you interact with them. This is to be expected. However, as you navigate your life with and without the game of Magic, you should at least consider how the game is inevitably a function of you as a learner. How you adapt as a player is a function of how you learn and how you adapt as a human being. In the "end," you should work to understand yourself as well as you can so that Magic can fit into your life in a way that enriches everything else you do. It's all too easy these days to look at the game as ancillary to your career or long term goals, but in reality everything fits together like a puzzle. I wouldn't be the teacher I am today were it not for Magic, and I would not be able to grow as a teacher or player if I failed to recognize that.

Education is not a means to an end. This implies that there exists some mystical "end." to the process of learning and changing. I'm 27 years old. Anyone older than me calls me a kid, and many younger than me consider me a journeyman. This is all irrelevant to me. As a Magic player and a person, I am in the process of growing into who and what I want to be, and nothing can stop this from happening.

Oh, and for the record, I'll never understand these kids today and their rap music.