Thomas Kane is an Instructor in English, complement house counselor in Fuess House, and coach of Boys JV Basketball. Previously, Kane has taught at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and Washington & Lee University. Additionally, he has published papers on historical figures such as Tupac Shakur and Martin Luther King Jr. In his free time, Kane enjoys participating in activities that inspire him to learn, including reading, writing, and housework.
What made you decide to teach English?
I did a lot of summer jobs where I figured out I didn’t want to do things. I went to Wall Street one summer, and I shadowed a lawyer at one point, and I figured out those were things that I didn’t want to do. I like ideas and turns out I like kids too. I like the sort of wackiness of kids and helping them grow into being full-on humanoids… I’m a real slow reader, and I wasn’t really a reader as a kid but I had in my high school English classes books like ‘A Clockwork Orange’ or ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’. [Later, I read] ‘1984’, and that’s when I actually started to really appreciate books. That’s sort of where it started. [Books] provoked my thinking in a way that wasn’t just about homework. It was actually about trying to understand the wider world, how complicated it is and how power works and how injustice happens and what might be done about it. Those were things that provoked my thinking, particularly in high school.
How do you approach teaching complex texts and what do you hope students take from your class?
I hope they take from my class the ability to think critically, to not accept things as they are and be skeptical in a good way. That is, to ask good questions and try to find out what’s operating beneath the surface. With the Seniors, they get the real authentic primary source, but then I usually use texts that they can appreciate or understand. So last week we did Freud’s ‘Notion of the Uncanny.’ The students had to read Freud. It’s a complicated text, but then I used Bruce Lee’s ‘Game of Death’ to make it make sense to the students. I tend to use different kinds of texts to open up the very difficult stuff.
You’ve received the UChicago Outstanding Educator Award a few times. What did this mean to you?
It’s a student remembering me, so it’s actually a particularly personal kind of thing. A particular student will write an essay about a teacher who was influential to them in high school, and it’s very gratifying to be recognized that way. Teachers in general don’t get a lot of recognition. They usually go to work and do their thing. So it’s very, very gratifying to be recognized, particularly by a former student… It’s the fact that a student named me, that’s what I find most rewarding about that.
What do you enjoy most about coaching JV Basketball, and how is it different from teaching in a classroom setting?
It’s just fun. I like being with kids and getting to know them. The coaching part brings out a competitive element that is a lot of fun. You’re playing somebody else, you’re trying to win, so kids forge bonds. When you’re on a term, it’s an experience you don’t have in other kinds of ways. In classes, the scheduling officer put you in there. In teams, you all opt in and you all want to win. There’s a strong bond that kids have on teams that I love to foster that… [In sports,] you take the gradebook out. That makes a big difference when you’re talking to kids. The gradebook is a big lens between a student and a teacher at Andover.
What do you enjoy most about being a house counselor complement in Fuess and what have you gained from that experience?
I enjoy getting to know a coherent set of kids. I lived in Stearns for 12 years, and I enjoyed the dorm. It’s where kids let down their guard. It’s probably the best classroom on campus, the most learning may happen in the dorm. Helping kids with life skills and other sorts of things such as living in community, getting to know people who are really different from you, and appreciating that… If there’s something going on on campus, if there’s a ‘6-7’ thing going on, it’s going to show up in the dorm. It’s a window into the real life of kids… It can be lots of fun. It can be challenging at times. Sometimes people make decisions that are a bit regrettable, but those are actually learning opportunities, so not really moments to punish people. That’s why I enjoy it.
What’s the biggest difference between teaching at universities and at a high school?
The biggest difference is developmental. What a kid can do in ninth grade is probably a lot different than a kid who’s a Junior or Senior in college, hopefully. Figuring out how to craft lessons and scaffold skills is very different. At the university level, the professor is authoritative and professional. It’s more about lecturing than it is about the dialogue. [In high schools], I do more teaching. That is, I set things up in a very deliberate way. Whereas when I was teaching college, I would assume that the students had done the work and we would be halfway down the road at the beginning of a class so that I was enriching what they’d already done, whereas this is setting up the dominoes before we knock them over.
What advice would you give to students pursuing a humanities-related subject in the future?
Read. There’s really no substitute for it, and it’s a challenge at this moment in history because there’s so many seductive things that are not reading. So much streaming, so many phones, so many screens. There’s lots of cool toys out there and we should definitely be playing with them but there’s no substitute for the actual old-fashioned act of reading.
What is your favorite genre of music?
I’d say ‘Y’allternative’ is what I call it. It’s alternative but I kind of like southern [music] too, so Uncle Tupelo, Sunvolt, Wilco, in that vein, that’s probably my favorite. I listen to tons of music, and I listen to any music, really. I make playlists all the time, and I make playlists that are vibey. I like to mix things up and have different things next to each other. Particularly when they surprise me or [when] I share these playlists with friends and family. If it surprises you that there’s a juxtaposition or something between songs in a playlist, that to me is a lot of fun.
What kind of hobbies do you have?
I write, which isn’t very exciting. I have played music. I haven’t in a while. I just pulled my guitar out of the closet, so hopefully I’ll get back to that a little bit. We have a house and I do a lot of stuff there. I do plumbing. My grandfather was a plumber. I get his tools. I do house stuff, and basically anything where I’m learning something. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t know when it comes to a house, [like] electricity and plumbing. These are things that I really have no clue about. If I can learn something and then do something, it’s really satisfying to watch it be completed.
You wrote your dissertation on automortography. What prompted your interest in it?
I wanted to write a dissertation that I wouldn’t get bored with. A lot of my peers were doing things that were the next step in a particular kind of research. I wanted a question that I couldn’t answer. I was thinking about Tupac Shakur’s death. I was in New York when he was shot and killed and watched the public memorialization of that. I’d always been kind of curious about Raymond Carver’s last story called ‘Errand’ where he writes about the deathbed scene of Anton Chekhov, who was a Russian writer who influenced him. Trying to think about how those two things had any kind of similarity and they did, and that’s really where I started. Then I coined the term ‘automortography’ pretty late in the process. It wasn’t something I had at the beginning. It was something that I named as I did some years of research on all sorts of different figures, including Martin Luther King Jr.
