How to boost creativity in academe (essay)

I'm going to teach the same class and write the same paper for the rest of my career. I realized this about six years ago, as a tenure-track assistant professor. It was a morbid insight, considering I was just getting into the grove of the academic lifestyle, defined by a 60 percent teaching, 40 percent research contract. The thought first came to me in a moment of teaching burnout. As lecturers, we know that the prep involved with teaching a class for the first time means exponentially more work. But if we continue to teach that class and claim it as “ours,” we can ease up. We can cover the same material and grade the same papers year after year. I’d already reached the fifth repetition of a course that I’d developed during my Ph.D. days. I was bored but didn’t feel the incentive to shake things up. I was overworked -- why add to my labor?