It was a cold morning, one of the coldest so far, I think.
We knew from the night before what roughly our challenge today would be: to teach people with three different disabilities (blind, deaf, and using only their non-dominate hand) a new skill or technique. We learned the next morning that we would be teaching each of these people two magic tricks, one in the morning with only 30 minutes preparation and the other later in the day, building off what we had learned from the previous teaching experience.
I chose a coin teleportation trick, unwittingly one that required both hands and put the person with only one arm out of the loop. I improvised with teaching that person the intro magic trick, which required no skill and didn’t fool anyone, but it got some laughs so I chalk it up to a successful first try.
The others struggled, as well as I did, to keep the whole group interested. It was difficult and time consuming to engage the whole group at once through elaborate spoken directions, hand motions, written words on the white board, and literal hands-on help. I felt a lot of anxiety as a teacher that I was letting the students down, though as a student I felt relaxed throughout the learning experience.
In the end it gave me a lot of empathy for people in teaching positions, this experience has explained to me a lot of what a frazzled teacher must be feeling in moments of student stress and failure.
