Teaching at the Speed of Soul

How a Waldorf Classroom Prepared Me to Teach with Artificial Intelligence

AI didn’t replace me. It revealed me.
My first classroom had no screens. Just rhythm, stories, chalk, and care.
Now I teach AI—but I still believe in breath before answer, form before formula.
The danger isn’t the tech. It’s forgetting the child.
Because presence isn’t outdated. It’s the future.

In the early 2000s, I took attendance with a pencil.

There was no other option. No learning management system. No tablets. Just wooden desks, a chalkboard, and a rhythm that held us all together. I even kept a silk cloth for covering my laptop during the day, which I rarely touched. My first classroom was a public Waldorf school, where students made their own books, where stories unfolded over days, and where the year turned with festivals, songs, and color. We drew constellations in chalk. We constructed cursive spelling words in wood chips on the grass. We studied Norse myths by candlelight in winter and debated Roman law in spring. We moved through learning like it was something alive.

Now I teach artificial intelligence.

I stand in front of rooms full of educators and pull back the wizard’s curtain. You may remember the one from Oz, all smoke and flame, designed to keep everyone in awe. Behind it wasn’t magic. It was machinery. Levers. A man improvising with a loud voice. That’s what I try to do with AI. I show what’s behind the illusion. I walk people through the parts: how to craft prompts with presence, how to shape outputs with meaningful language, how to build lesson plans that don’t lose the learner in the speed of the tool. I teach tone. Revision. Voice. And I don’t pretend this isn’t powerful—or dangerous. AI has teeth. But so do we. We have the teeth of discernment, clarity, and care. And still, power isn’t presence. And speed isn’t rhythm. I still teach. But the chalk is gone. And, the rhythm can be harder to find.

And yet—I don’t feel like I left anything behind.

Back then, I didn’t know I was training for this. But I was. Waldorf didn’t prepare me to use technology. It prepared me to meet it. Not with fear. Not with distraction. With attention. With rhythm. With care.

I think about that often. Especially when the pace quickens. When the tools promise more than I can hold. When teachers are told they’re obsolete, or when students are pulled further into screens without anyone anchoring the space between the inputs and outputs. To this end, there’s a line from Steiner I’ve carried for years that goes, “We must eradicate from the soul all fear and terror of what comes toward us out of the future…Surely nothing else will do if our courage is not to fail us.” It came back to me in an airport, on my way to say goodbye to my best friend who was dying. And I was trying to hold myself together in a line, surrounded by small talk and headlines. That quote didn’t solve anything. But it gave me a human ground to stand on, because years previously, it had been engraven upon my soul.

That’s what my time in Waldorf education gave me. Ground.

We had another phrase: Rhythm replaces strength, until the strength becomes rhythm. I used to think that applied mostly to children. Bedtimes. Meals. Transitions in the classroom. But lately, I’ve been thinking about it in larger terms. Systems. Institutions. Learning itself. I was talking with a colleague who teaches in a juvenile hall. The kids are divided into two sections of the jail—some stay long-term, some just pass through awaiting court. You’d think the long-term group would be harder to reach, and that’s the sentiment of the transient population. But it’s the opposite. They have rhythm. They have structure. The chaos eases. They settle into something unfamiliar.

When you don’t have to brace for what comes next, you can start to learn.

This reminded me of a hot August morning years ago when I took my young son blackberry picking. We were exposed in the blistering heat of Northern California crawling through thorny brambles. The best berries were always out of reach. It was slow, frustrating work. He wanted to quit. So did I. But we didn’t because I knew what the four year old didn’t. We stayed in it. Not just for the harvest—we barely filled the bowl. But because Grandpa was expecting berries to make pie for the family, and also for the experience of doing something hard, together. That’s what Steiner called building the Will of a child; what people now in ivory towers might call formative friction. Because it’s not punishment, it’s not obstacles, it’s challenge that shapes us.

And I wonder—where does that exist in classrooms driven by speed? In platforms that reward speed over struggle? In workflows where answers are cheap and meaning is optional? In systems where the product, no matter how it was created or what was gained along the way, is the goal. Hesiod, the ancient Greek poet, understood this when he wrote, “Before the gates of excellence, the high gods have placed sweat. Long is the road thereto, and rough and steep at first, but whe the heights are reached, then there is ease, though it is griveously hard in the winning.”

I carried that idea into my classroom, even if I didn’t name it then. When I taught sixth grade geometry, I didn’t begin with compasses. I began with a story. A horse tethered to a post, galloping in a circle. The students could feel the radius before they knew its name. The math emerged from metaphor, from play, from muscle and breath. Only then did we reach for rulers.

Now I teach prompts. But I still believe in the circle. In form drawn from movement. In questions that hold enough tension to invite thinking, not just answers. A good prompt is like a chalk line—temporary, expressive, built for revision.

The problem isn’t AI. The problem is what we bring to it. Our assumptions about what matters. Our urgency in product over process. Our willingness to let the tool lead when it should be following the learner. And that matters, because what we bring shapes what students experience. Because, according to Self-Determination Theory, humans need three things to thrive: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. But if we design our AI use around control, speed, and isolation, we risk undermining all three. Autonomy becomes automation. Competence becomes passive consumption. Relatedness disappears entirely.

I didn’t have language for that back then, but I saw the antidote unfold every day. Students chose how to shape their learning. They got good at real things—singing in rounds, knitting uneven but earnest rows, reciting poetry they’d memorized by heart. They built shelters. They told stories. They rehearsed until the rhythms clicked. They were seen. They belonged.

And more than anything, they were allowed to care. About the work. About each other. About themselves.

But perhaps I’m waxing poetic about the past. AI can support all those needs. It can scaffold growth. It can offer feedback, insight, and as Stanford researcher Chris Piech so eloquently shares, even joy. But not by accident. And not without us. It also reminds me that Steiner warned of two opposing forces in human development: the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. One pulls us into abstraction, disembodiment, illusion. The other drags us into cold mechanism, control, and lifeless order. Education, at its best, is the space between. The warm center. The human balance in the middle. And yet, we need both. The imagination that lifts us beyond the visible, and the structure that anchors us to what’s real. The spark and the scaffolding. The dream and the discipline. The danger isn’t in their presence. The danger is in their excess. When we lean too far into illusion, or too far into control, we lose the child. We lose ourselves. AI, like anything powerful, carries both tendencies. And so our role is not to resist it blindly or embrace it carelessly, but to walk that middle path. To hold the balance. To teach—not just with tools, but with soul.

If we forget why we teach. If we hand over the soul of learning in exchange for speed or scale, we risk slipping into one or both extremes. We could build systems that look polished, even impressive, but feel hollow in the places that matter most. Places where no one is really known. Where the learning moves and assessment scores soar, but nothing moves inside.

I’ve come to believe that the best preparation for the future isn’t mastery of tools—it’s mastery of attention. It’s rhythm. It’s knowing what’s yours to carry, and what you’re here to witness. In Waldorf, we taught students to breathe with the seasons. To draw with intention. To wait before answering. That wasn’t a rejection of progress. It was a training in presence.

And presence is what the future needs most.

I’m certain that AI will not replace teachers. But it may reveal which ones are paying attention.

Not to the dashboard. Not to the scores.

To the child.

To the moment.

To the rhythm underneath it all.

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Jacob Carr is an educator, speaker, and author exploring the intersection of technology and soul in modern learning. He began his teaching career in a public Waldorf school, where rhythm, attention, and story shaped his understanding of what education could be. Now, he trains educators across the country to integrate artificial intelligence with intention, care, and human presence. His work invites a slower, more reflective approach to innovation—one where the future of learning is still rooted in what matters most.

You can hear more of these conversations on his podcast, What Teachers Have to Say, where he and co-host Nathan Collins explore the real work—and real heart—of education today.