Today was the first day that we did "modified contour drawings", and thus the first day that we were allowed to occasionally look at the paper to check positioning, angle and length of lines, etc. I feel better and more focused when I'm drawing now, but my drawings are worse, because my pencil is almost never going in the direction I think it's going in. It's very weird.
Before, when I tried to draw things, I would constantly be looking back and forth between then thing I was trying to draw and my paper, assessing shape and angle and whatever. Now I'm supposed to be spending 90% of my time looking at the thing I'm drawing while my pencil traces contour lines on the paper, and occasionally (I suppose that would be 10%...) checking to make sure I'm still on track. I'm almost never on track. It's very frustrating. And I'm almost never concentrating because of constant classroom distractions. In all of the instructions it says "allow at least 30 minutes of uninterrupted drawing time for this exercise." HA! If I can get my students to sit for more than 5 minutes, it's a good day.
No matter how much I currently suck at it, though, I do think this is the right way for me to draw, because I feel good doing it. I took a similar leap of faith when I started relearning the violin, and so far that's turned out OK.