Try everything, and make lots of mistakes.

Every day some student or many students do something brilliant. (Not necessarily related to class instruction.)

I demonstrated How to Make a Zine to the English class on Friday--the one that read Romeo and Juliet forever. The class is working on graphic novels now--they're reading El Deafo and will make their own little graphic memoir.

I'd showed the teacher my zine--How to make a zine like this-- and suggested we offer that format to the students for their projects. She thought it was a good idea. Unexpectedly we work together pretty well. Her teaching skills are underwhelming*, but she's nice enough and she treats me with respect––a winning strategy!––and I reciprocate.

The teacher turned half a class period over to me, and zine making went generally well – – and extremely well in a direction I had not foreseen.

I handed out the instruction zine, ledger size (11" x 17") pieces of paper, and scissors, and led everyone, step-by-step, in making one. 
I’d say about half the class was mildly (or not at all) interested,
almost half was pretty interested,
and two people were lit up by it – – including a girl who is usually hiding under her hoodie. I'd only recently learned that she loves to draw, and she’s pretty accomplished. 

I don’t know her story, but her stuff is dark and sad, sometimes disturbing.
At any rate, she obviously loved making the zine, so I asked her if she wanted more pieces of paper. She proceeded to make six more, put them in a tidy little stack in front of her, then started illustrating her first one.

I was chuffed.

These little things that come in from the side can make a big difference in a person’s life – – for 2+ months this girl has not shown any engagement in class that I could see, and all of a sudden she lights up.

The other enthusiast was a boy who always seems disengaged, kinda spacey. Halfway through the demonstration, he'd finished his zine and was helping the kid next to him.

"Have you made these before?" I asked. (A couple kids had.)

"No," he said, "I looked at the directions."

LOL, he was the only one who did, or, anyway, the only one who could follow them.
I find 3D instructions really hard to follow, and the ones I drew in the zine weren't clear and complete.
He must have good 3D intelligence, and it was so nice to see him shine.

I was telling my friend KG about this--how happy I am that I could unlock some of the students' joy and competence--and relieved too. After all, I said, laughing, “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

She replied, “It doesn’t matter!”

Weirdly, I think this is true.

What matters more is getting yourself aligned with who you are, and working forward/outward from that.

My best supporter, librarian John, advised me:
"You are new here, and you came in midstream--that's a hard thing to do. Try everything, and make lots of mistakes.
Next fall you can start fresh with everyone else."

That's my plan.
________________________

*Example of the English teacher's approach:
she'd suggested that instead of me demonstrating how to make a zine, we just show a youTube video about it.

Why do so many teachers use videos? They're inferior. I mean, especially when here was a live person volunteering to teach the task.
An episode of Hidden Brain podcast, Close Enough: Living Through Others"  how watching video tutorials of experts teaching things doesn't result in us doing things better--or doing them at all:

"Watching seems intimately connected to our perceptions that we're learning. [But] watching experts perform a skill, watching them over and over again, improves people's confidence but not their ability. . . . It turns out there's all sorts of internal reactions and feelings and emotions and nerves that make it harder than it seems."

I told the teacher I thought it'd work better if I led the students in person, step by step.
And of course it did.

These are not the students who sign up for after-school robotics, the self-motivated, well-supported students with high processing speeds.
These are kids who work better with a lot of support, who find things hard going, and who are used to being treated as problems.

Even though I was going slowly and helping every student with every fold, one girl (one of my favorites ) cried out halfway through,
"THIS IS STRESSING ME OUT!"

I told her no one had to make the zine--it wasn't a graded assignment, it was just for fun.
And I said, "I'm sorry to stress you out."

"That's okay," she said, "It's better than what we usually do in this class."

Ha, how's that for a backhanded compliment?
She did finish making one zine with me though, and I count that as success---simply that she hung in there.

She would have done nothing with a youTube, given that she wasn't inspired in the first place.

Not that watching experts is bad--if it inspires you to try for yourself.
From Hidden Brain:

"It's really important, as we're trying to pick up new skills, to have a longer term mindset in place. If you have that mindset, it's good to feel inspired to action by experts that we watch.

But mental simulation just isn't built to incorporate physiological reactions - internal states. Those are states reserved for experience. Unfortunately we spend so much time just in a state of mental simulation."

I find this comforting as I flail about at work. My many years of life experience help me, but very little of that is with children.
Luckily children are people, and a lot of my experience transfers.
But I'm gonna practice, practice, practice.
Fail again, fail better. And take heart when I succeed, at least with some students.