I have wise and smart people that I follow. When I stop following them, I get off-track.

Last year, I was following the pedagogy of artists like Lynda Barry, Austin Kleon, Ray Bradbury, and Sr. Corita. It wasn’t a perfect teaching year, but it was pretty darn good. Made me glad that I had returned to the classroom.

This year, I didn’t outright reject any of my “someones,” but I got a little too focused on outcomes and trying to measure up to what I thought a “good teacher” was supposed to be. I wanted even higher test scores for my students. Even greater “growth” as measured by data.

And this semester has been a tougher one as a result.

I wasn’t following in a good way. Definitely not in a better way. I wasn’t following the wise or the smart, just the “efficient.” I was doing what I thought was “necessary,” without doing what I knew was good. I was falling prey to the same “product”-focused mindset, the same “transactional” trend in education that stripped a lot of my teaching down to an unrecognizable grind.

Not good discipline. Not good discipleship.

For starters, I abandoned my practice of having students write daily in a writer’s notebook. Yes, last year I had many students who never took it seriously and treated it as busy work. But instead of experimenting this year with ways of making the notebook actually matter to more of my students, I chucked it completely. Bad discipline. I knew the notebook worked for me, for others, for lots of students both last year and years past. The solution wasn’t to stop following the practice that had sustained me in the classroom; the solution was to find ways to make it work better for myself and my students.

Similarly, I went back to letting students use their laptops much more in the classroom. Many of them utterly hated all the handwriting we did last year.

But again, I knew — from so many artists, writers, and thinkers that I admire, and from my own experience — that hand-work is good. Doing tangible, analog things with our hands and bodies is important to our minds and souls.

Instead of finding ways to make the hand-work more meaningful for students, I gave up on it.

Not good discipline.

A new semester is starting in January, and I’ve decided to get back to following in a good way. Hopefully, even, a better way.