After walking into the Honors Red House to interview Kenny Thompson, full-time lecturer for both the Honors and the Synergy program, he is sitting on the couch, giving words of encouragement to a student preparing for finals.
Right away it is easy to see Thompson’s character and compassion for students and their college experience after seeing this interaction and after an interview on his endeavors at the university, compassion is an understatement.
Thompson has been teaching at the university for technically three years in Honors, he said, but only two years as a full-time lecturer. He has taught Honors Colloquium I and II, American Indian Studies, Fantasy and Video Games courses over his time at the university. Though he enjoys teaching now, he did not always see himself as a professor.
“I found that I always did teach,” Thompson said. “I was really annoying about it too. I would teach anything from guitar to random things about cars to people, I’ve always been teaching, sometimes to my detriment. But yeah, since about, I’d say 2007 I knew I wanted to teach, really early in my undergraduate.”
Thompson said he did not even have plans to go to college originally.
“I didn’t think that it was possible for me,” Thompson said. “My parents didn’t go to college, most of my friends didn’t go to college, lots of them went to oil fields or the military or something like that and it was basically [that] I hated the job opportunities I had and I couldn’t afford rent, so I went to college, a community college.”
As far as English, Thompson said he, “just enjoyed it.”
“It just matches the way that I view the world,” Thompson said. “I usually put people first and English emphasizes that.”
The Honors program chose him, he said. Thompson said he teaches in the program because as a student, it gave him meaning in ways that, “just going to college didn’t.” He said being an instructor in the program is cool because those were some of his favorite courses to take and the sense of community it brings is great.
When it comes to teaching, Thompson is easily able to explain how important the learning environment is to him.
“It’s very fulfilling to create a class and then have it, I guess, conclude with a group of students and have some effect on those students,” Thompson said. “I won’t even lie that some of it is just pure ego that I like to build something and then see the product of that endeavor. Every day that I get up, be it grading or lesson planning or even banal stuff like answering emails, I see the day-to-day products of that.”
As for his biggest take away that he wants his students to have from his courses, it is down to reorienting their position in the learning process.
“I really hate that there are so many people that have been just trained and I mean, our public-school system and other industries do this, they train us into thinking that we have to go to a classroom to learn and that the teacher basically pours all of this knowledge into our brains and then we just go on our way,” Thompson said. “I really hate that because it goes against everything that I know about learning based on experience and research.”
Thompson said because of this trained point of view on learning, he wants his students to realize they are the ones that need to learn and he is just a resource for them. He wants students to, “realize that and then celebrate it.”
Though he loves his job, Thompson said one of the biggest challenges is trying to find “where I start and where teaching ends.”
“I’ll not be able to sleep occasionally, and by occasionally, I mean all the time, you can ask my wife,” Thompson said. “It’ll be eleven o’clock at night and I’ll be freaking out about how I am going to re-work a lesson plan or even talk about a prompt that more students can understand it.”
He said that it “doesn’t ever stop” and though that is why he does this job, finding limits can be difficult.
“It could be Sunday at noon and if a student emails me with an emergency, I want to deal with that, even if it may cut into other elements of my life that are not necessarily teaching,” Thompson said.
This may be a challenge for Thompson, but he says his students inspire him and teach him a lot about himself and how he teaches a class.
“It’s really strange, it’s often the little things about students that inspire me the most,” Thompson said. “Any time that goal of teaching is turned onto me, when that stupid cliché of the student becoming a master happens where you get these very groups of people from diverse backgrounds, sometimes vastly different ages or countries. They all get into a class and are able to produce something, even for a second, that resembles cohesion or community, that’s always inspiring.”
Teaching is something Thompson does not plan on leaving for any other profession any time soon because of the students.
“I can’t go to a normal profession ever again because of my interactions with students and what I mean by that is I can’t just do a job where I go in and I do my work and then clock out and then never work with people again,” Thompson said. “I feel like it’s almost too easy and I can take it for granted that I’m helping people in some way and the students help me by asking for help essentially. But yeah, I can never go back.”
