On teachers’ creative life

Abstract

It seems symptomatic of the social media era that most people’s diet of inspirational quotes is nowadays supplied by social networking sites, awash as they are with the pithy quips and maxims of a host of enlightened writers, artists and celebrities. What was once the job of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations is now being done by Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest among others. The original source of these quotes is rarely cited and almost never given any importance. It seems as if we have all read Albert Einstein, William Shakespeare and Mahatma Gandhi, we have all listened to Steve Jobs’s (2005) Stanford University commencement speech, and we have all watched Dead Poets Society, Forrest Gump, Rocky Balboa and The Pursuit of Happyness. In the process of ultra skimming through countless posts and tweets, with some luck such inspirational quotes are read and shared. However, if they are not properly digested the words would not be worthy of being termed ‘inspirational’. In this article I reflect on the significance, with respect to teachers’ creative identity, of a quote I came across recently.