Radical Sabbatical

August 11, 2025 - Here I am at the Denver Public Library on my very first day of sabbatical.

It’s. So. Quiet.

Wow. It has been a long time since I’ve had the opportunity to work without interruption. I love my job as Theatre faculty at Red Rocks Community College, but it’s certainly not without challenges. One of them is trying to get anything done in the mayhem of a thriving department.

When I first heard I had received a sabbatical, I was stunned. The gift of quiet time to do deep work. Are you kidding me? I’m not sure the powers that be fully realize how big a deal this is. All I can say is THANK YOU.

So the first thing I am going to do on my first day of sabbatical in this deafeningly quiet library is to read and rewrite my manifesto.

That’s right. This is going to be a radical sabbatical.

Let me back up a few months.

On the last day of classes, spring semester, 2025, something clicked deep within me. It was a weird moment for creative inspiration. This was the time of year when I barely knew my name. I’d been grading nonstop for weeks, dealing with drama from students and staff, unsure whether I was coming or going . . . and did I remember to feed the cats? Water the husband? No, that wasn’t right.

Burnout was real and immediate.

In the middle of this mayhem, I got up at 5 am and blurted out a manifesto. Not a wish, a hope, or a teaching statement. A MANIFESTO. In longhand first and then into a more permanent format on my laptop. I didn’t want to forget it.

On the way to and from work that week, I had been listening to part of an Ezra Klein/NY Times podcast about education. Worries about AI, the fact that young people don’t read anymore, questions about what we should do as educators to prepare students if we don’t know what’s coming in this world. Blah, blah, blah, doom and gloom. But I thank Ezra Klein for bringing this up, because it lit a fire within me.

One of the things Ezra mentioned was that ultimately, we are preparing kids to get a good job.

Yes, I thought. But no. Not ultimately.

Getting a good job and living an abundant life are important. But come on, we can do better.

Thanks in large part to advances in technology, we may be moving away from jobs where we’re treated like parts of a machine. Those jobs are dehumanizing. Most of us have had them at some point in life. Many of us are currently stuck in one with no idea how to extract ourselves from the cogs and levers. If we walk away, who will take up that one little movement that keeps everything clicking along?

These jobs suck the life out of us. If we’re truly going to utilize the advances in technology that have come in the last century, it should be to get ourselves out of that cycle. It’s a waste of life. No one should spend 8-12 hours a day as a piece of machinery.

Now is the time to grow artists. We need engaged, creative thinkers, in all aspects of life—not just the arts. It’s impossible to change our communities without cultivating this mindset.

I’m not suggesting that everyone drop the “real” job and make theater. This is bigger. I think every aspect of society could blossom with a different mindset, a different path to learning.

I see a future student developing a sustainable clothing line, or a new philosophy, a way to feed the hungry, a way to travel faster to other planets, technology that turns trash into useful products—maybe they’ll even develop a theater company that truly honors artists and pays them well—one that creates stunning new work that sparks useful conversations . . . and sells out every show.

So what’s the change that can ignite this new world I see in my imagination? It starts small. In a single classroom. I will create a space where students have TIME for deep learning, engagement, creativity, collaboration, invention, dreaming, discovery. They’re going to do it IN CLASS. And my hope is the work is so exciting they get obsessed and spend lots of time outside of class pursuing it, too. But I’m not going to ask that of them at first. At first, they will be assured that all they need to do when they enter my classroom is engage. They will be rewarded for it. The challenge to them is to use our time to think bigger than they have before.

Let me jump off my cloud for a second and make a quick clarification. I didn’t come up with this idea. As luck would have it, I just completed several months as a student in the Active Learning Institute, led by Kerri Mitchell and Eric Salahub from Front Range Community College. It opened my mind to the benefits of active learning and the overwhelming evidence that students do not learn from lectures. A quote from Dr. Terry Doyle was drilled into my head throughout the course: “The person who does the work, does the learning.”

Okay, back to the manifesto . . .

My students are going to embrace struggle. I will create the space for them to do that—and REWARD them for it. We will build community in our little part of the world. They will have a chance to dream, to find out what they are truly good at, and to gather the tools to thrive wherever they go next.

I will plant seeds, one student at a time. I will struggle with them toward success. This is not going to be easy, because almost every class they’ve taken up to this point is nothing like this. I will make all the conditions right and then let them run with it. Their little dandelion fluffs of energy will catch the wind, and I’ll watch them change the world.

Through my life-long pursuit of theatre and music, I know one more very important truth: artists who know their worth are not afraid of struggle. They also understand the value of working with others. They are open to new ideas. And they feel comfortable and safe sharing their own thoughts.

I’m surprised I got up early to write on that early May morning at the end of a marginally successful semester. I’m grateful I have time now to build on it.

I will plant seeds. And I am certain students will in turn blow my mind when they spread their energy, their hard work, and their love far from our classroom.

This is my manifesto.

Today in this freakily quiet library, I will start to build a textbook with these thoughts at its core. I will make the conditions right to grow artists.