creating a hash that starts wtih 9 zeros I am working on a school problem and want to generate a hash starting with 9 zeros, it is assumed to be the first block with only your name and the previous hash is 64 zeros. 

Can anybody help me or show me how to mine/create a 9 zero hash?
This exercise is actually a good way to understand proof-of-work. In order solve your problem, you need to pass your input into SHA256 until you get a hash with 9 zeros, there is no other way around it other than brute force. This is because SHA256 is a one-way function which cannot be solved in reverse. As you've already learned, brute forcing will take many guesses. It would be a good exercise to calculate just how many guesses it would take and how fast normal hardware could do this:

Get the target value. Your maximum target is:
000000000fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

Divide by ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff, which is the maximum value of a 256-bit number. You now have the probability of a single hash solving a block. Or, as you pointed out, you can calculate the probability of getting 9 zeros in a row in base 16 (1/16^9). Using wolframalpha,
target / max256 = 1.46E-11

Take the reciprocal of the probability to get the average number of hashes to solve a block.
1/1.46E-11 = 6.85E10 or
68.5 Billion

Divide the average number of hashes by the hashrate of your hardware (a typical laptop does can maybe do around 100k Hash/sec) to get the average number of seconds required to solve a block.
6.85E10 / 100,000 = 685,000 seconds or just over a week


Nowadays Bitcoin is mined using dedicated hardware (ASICs) that can do terahashes/second and solve this in less than a second, however, they are usually configured to mine on a pool using a specific protocol (e.g. stratum) so it would require either modifying the miner software or the pool software if you wanted to pass in arbitrary data to hash. Since this is a finance class, this is not likely the purpose of the assignment and was probably designed for you to fail to teach a lesson.
Also, here is another resource that might help: Generation Calculator.