Meet Mr. Thompson!

Why I Teach What I Teach: I love language and literature, and I used to teach Spanish when I lived in Mississippi- I felt pretty confident teaching it there, where I was the only semi-bilingual person for three counties- but I think I'd feel like something of a fraud teaching Spanish, which is my second language, in a state where a large percentage of the population is made up of native speakers. So it's English.
What Scares Me Most: Finding out that everything- that all of my struggles and all of my accomplishments and all of my attempts to treat the people in my life well- that it's all meaningless in the end.
What Makes Me Cry: Animal euthanasia- particularly when it's the end result of human stupidity.
What Makes Me Laugh: Flight of the Conchords.
Guilty Pleasure: Old movie musicals, specifically The Sound of Music.
Biggest Influence: My Mammaw Thompson.
Most Embarrassing Moment: When I was a kid, my dad tried everything in his power to make me an athlete, signing me up for a soccer team or a basketball team every year. I didn't mind soccer, because I could play defense and almost never see any action- I could just stare at my feet and talk to myself for minutes at a time. Then during a big game one Saturday afternoon, the other team's forward started to run straight at me out of nowhere. I was entirely unprepared, so I screamed as loudly as I was able to- it seemed like the thing to do at the time, and it brought the game to a halt for a few minutes while my coach and the referee tried to determine what was wrong with me. Honestly, I wasn't all that embarrassed by it, but my dad was- I never had to play an organized sport again.