Autumn is here and I’m going back to school!

I’m a newly minted teacher with a temporary full time contract until the end of January 2027. I’m very excited! I’ve been working towards this for years, and this summer has been full of planning and re-planning lessons. It’ll be nice to see if all of my best laid plans work or tank miserably.

I think teaching is an inherently creative act, or at least that’s the only way I know how to approach it. Planning certainly takes creativity. Every day there are new problems to solve, communication that needs calibrating, different concepts and practices that need real-time re-contextualizing. The challenge of teaching will require my full attention if I want to get good at it.

I’m optimistic heading into this new career, but it is going to be a TON of work. Hard work. The sort of work that has my mind spinning and that I’ll lose sleep over. Discouragement is only a matter of time. Feeling overwhelmed will be the river I float on or sink in.

Here’s the question I’ve been pondering: What role does creativity play in sustaining a teaching practice, when that very same teaching practice requires creativity to exist Or, put another way…

Is Creativity a Limited Resource?

I’ve always needed a creative outlet to get me through the stresses of life.

If I were to make a Venn diagram of why I enjoy cartooning, reading in-between the lines of each overlapping circle would articulate to two main motivations: It brings me joy, and it helps me to self-regulate. It’s fun to make comics, and it’s fun to see people’s reactions to them. But more than that, when life is stressful and feels out of my control, cartooning reminds me that I can control the ink on that page. That small act of creativity helps me keep things in perspective.

But friends: making comics is so dang time consuming. Drawing, yes, but writing them as well. If there’s one thing new teachers don’t have a lot of, it’s free time. Is that the true bottleneck?

I often find myself treating creativity as if it were a battery, and I start each day with a limited amount of discharges. But over YEARS of thinking about it, I’ve intentionally chosen to see creativity as adding fuel to a fire- it takes a spark of something that’s already going and amplifies it exponentially. Creativity isn’t something to be miserly with. Once in a while I need to write a blog post like this to remind me that I have already made the choice to view creativity in this way.

I need to continue to find time for creative self expression, because it’s the only way creativity will grow. It isn’t an “I can either be a good teacher or a cartoonist”, it’s a both-and situation. It MAY even be a ‘you can’t have one without the other’ situation.

Creativity is unlimited! But there are only so many hours in a day.

With out a doubt, I won’t be able to make as much comics as I have been throughout my university career, my substitute teaching days, and that glorious summer vacation that is the envy of every other profession and occupation. But, in one form or another, I’ll keep making comics. I hope you’ll stick around for them.