Well I have just finished my first ever month of Art Teaching! Despite being at work each day before my husband even wakes up, It is so far, my second favourite job ever. It is infinitely less stressful than teaching kindergarten, and much more enjoyable than working in an office.

(If you're wondering, the best job I ever had, was being paid by COFA to work in my studio during the Spring Fair).

I love making things, and I love making things with other people. I also love being better than other people at making things.(Even if they are only teenagers,trying something for the first time). So teaching art has been a nice fit, so far. (Although embarrassingly enough, there are plenty of 15 year olds who are better than me at lino printing, and many, many more who are much better than me at photography...)

Although I will say that If I wasn't an Art Teacher, I don't think I could handle teaching. I take my hat off to all the other teachers who can't count making a coil pot as part of their lesson preparation. I feel like I am slowly being buried under reports, more reports, marking, lesson planning, frantically trying to squash information into my brain so I can know marginally more than the students, and the endless endless list of requirements New Teachers need to organise for the Teachers Institute. Phew.

I have been really disciplined about not taking work home, but I can see how this could be an all-encompassing job for a lot of people. Fortunately for me, I have been teaching at a private girls school full of wonderfully institutionalised and enthusiastic students, meaning that classroom teaching is actually pretty fun, leaving me with enough energy after class  to slowly conquer that growing mountain of paperwork.

There have been plenty of unexpected insights this past month. I don't feel like enough of a grown up to be responsible for so many teenagers, and this job has highlighted just how blunt, impatient, and cranky I am. Sometimes when I speak to children they look as though they want to cry. eesh...It startles me each time a student asks me for help, as if I know stuff, and I've found myself saying lots of possibly untrue things with certainty. I dread questions in Art History lessons, because the three sentences I just verbalised about Romanticism, was actually the extent of my knowledge of the movement...

One unexpectedly difficult thing about this job is the professional dress code. I am not allowed to wear jeans, trackies, leggings, or anything I would normally wear for art making. Consequently, I am still working out how to teach art in a pencil skirt. Its tricky, trust me.

This blog is named after a book I'm reading at the moment: The Creative Call by Janice Elsheimer. She writes about how to live a more creative life from a Christian perspective, but it's helpful for anyone I think. She encourages those of us who feel compelled to make and create things, not to ignore that feeling, but to nurture it. She talks about how to manage self-doubt and artists block giving really practical advice - such as how to prioritise art-making when managing your time and budget, and the need to have a set space for your art.

Most importantly however, she has made me think a lot about why I create, a daunting question indeed.  I hope to explore some of the issues this book raises throughout this blog, as a process of working out what I think, and it's practical implications.