Jason Lewis occasionally makes mistakes in front of his students. He's perfectly fine with that. When a student catches an error on the board, Jason doesn't flinch. "Look," he tells them. "We're learning. See? 

Nothing happened to me. I'm completely okay." That's useful information in a classroom built around electricity, metal, and machines, where something is eventually going to go wrong. Sometimes literally. "You set a resistor on fire, you do something, and yeah, that will stick with you," he said. "You'll go, 'Oh, I shouldn't do that again.'"

Jason understands that lesson personally. He's spent much of his life taking things apart, building things, and occasionally discovering what doesn't work. He's also a self-described "goofball" who broke both an arm and a leg as a middle schooler, mostly from climbing into things and falling out of them. Around that same time, with YouTube still new, he taught himself basic electronics, how servos and motors worked, and once tried building a crossbow. Asked what he'd tell that younger version of himself, his answer came without much hesitation: keep going, just maybe don't break anything else.

He's also an Española Valley High School graduate, Class of 2012, who's returned to his alma mater to rebuild something that mostly disappeared after he left. When Jason was a student, he could take woodworking, welding, and AutoCAD, learning the fundamentals of arc welding through an agriculture class. Then the teachers who ran those programs retired. "The programs kind of died off with them," he said.

His own path explains why that mattered. His grandfather worked with electricity; his father became an electrician, installing residential and commercial systems and photovoltaics, and Jason tagged along on jobs, learning by watching. He took welding at Española Valley every year the school allowed, partly, he admits, because a teenager with a welder wants to make "big dumb swords." He eventually figured out there wasn't much of a market for giant swords, but the itch to build stuck. While waiting on Northern New Mexico College to restructure its engineering program, he earned an associate degree in welding instead of sitting idle, then finished an engineering degree afterward. Something was still missing. "The math is clean," he said, "but the real world isn't so clean. It's real messy."

The missing piece turned out to be teaching. While tutoring and teaching GED math at Northern, a professor noticed something Jason hadn't considered about himself: he could actually explain things to people with zero background, in a way that made it click. He got his alternative license and came back to Española Schools, teaching math at the middle school before moving to the high school, where he's now launching CTE electives - electricity, metalworking, welding - almost from scratch. This first group of students are his self-described "guinea pigs," though he includes himself in the experiment just as much. "They have patience for me, and I have patience for them."

What he's really building is confidence. He remembers teaching Ohm's Law and watching students who'd insisted for years they weren't "math people" suddenly realize, "this is the same thing you did in algebra."

He's seen the same click with geometry: a student won't recognize the Pythagorean theorem by name, but mention the 3-4-5 method used in construction, and someone remembers an uncle using exactly that on a job. In one electricity class, Jason sent students home with a simple assignment: find the ground-fault outlets in your bathroom and kitchen, and figure out why they're there. One student came back excited; they'd noticed theirs kept tripping, and realized on their own that a sink was leaking behind the wall. Real-world troubleshooting, triggered by a homework question. "That's the biggest thing in my classroom," Jason said. "You can't be afraid to get something wrong." What's the worst that happens? You get the answer wrong. The building doesn't collapse. He jokes he won't burst into flames either. You just try again.

Jason has his own theory for why he ended up better suited to teaching than to a lab at nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the pay would likely have been better. He compares it to a tabletop game: a lot of brilliant engineers, he says, "dump all their points into intelligence" and never invest any in charisma. "I think I'd be a better help here in my community that I grew up in," he said, "trying to teach the students, try and give them that push, than just staying in a room in a laboratory."

That community shapes how he talks about the place itself. Española gets "a bad rap" from wealthier neighboring towns, Jason says, low-income, overlooked, but he's found something different living inside it: colleagues who, it turned out, had known his father and grandfather decades earlier. He teaches New Mexico history partly because the region's story deserves better than a footnote, pointing to acequia water-rights systems as one of the earliest working forms of local government anywhere, solutions this area figured out long before other parts of the world caught up.

Now, in the same building where someone once handed him a welding torch and let him find out what he could do with it, Jason is handing tools to the next generation. Some will become electricians. Some will weld. Some will study engineering, or realize none of it is really for them, which is fine too. The math, Jason knows, can be clean. Finding out what you're actually capable of is almost always a little messier.