It is inevitable that every fall I get hit with the depressing fact that in order to put food on the table I have to teach. It sounds obvious, I know. I'm a teacher. I teach. But I also create, a fact that can very easily get lost in the shuffle of everyday life. And the weird part is that if I don't create, I get terribly anxious.
Now I have had the fortune of being able to teach in a place that allows me the creative license to generate new material at will, a fact that all of my colleagues in the field decidedly don't share. But while they are busy following restrictive curriculum guides, I am busily developing and implementing new lessons, paper ideas, and activities. Before any teacher screams that teaching is a creative art!, or I create new lessons/tests/etc., too!, let me clarify. I choose, sometimes foolishly, to generate new material all of the time. I think it has something to do with my creative side coming out to play in a subconscious way. I think it means that I secretly want to write, or am too afraid to really go for it, and the new unit/lesson/test/paper somehow satisfies the creative side of my mind. And so, in the end, no new writing gets done, but some pretty interesting pedagogical materials get created. And who feels the greater loss? Me?
Perhaps.
All I know is that I should be grading essays right now. But it feels really good to be writing.
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