Keeping track of Rene Gingras
“I don’t think teaching is your calling.”
The year was 1977, Rene Gingras had just finished his first year at UNH’s Thompson School after a stint researching fruit genetics at the University of Arkansas. In Little Rock, he’d realized that, rather than do research, he wanted to teach.
The student tracked him down twice.
She told him after the course. She called him months later at home to tell him again that he should seriously consider another career.
Gingras took her comments to heart.
“I questioned it throughout the summer. I was nervous, and hadn’t settled into a teaching style, and thought there might be something to what she said,” says Gingras. “What made it worse was that I had already committed to teach an Elderhostel course full of retired professors that summer.”
Gingras went to work. He sat in on classes taught by other professors, met with his department chair, and listened to the retired professors in his class. At the end of the summer course, the comments were vastly different.
The students revealed that they had learned from Gingras, and he had also learned what would become one of his guiding principles of teaching.
“I try to teach without letting them know it,” he says with a grin. “I want them to relax, because the courses themselves are very demanding, and I don’t want to create a threatening environment.”
Twenty-five quizzes, four exams, a workbook, and a lab project a semester are standard in Gingras’s courses in horticulture. While the workload itself doesn’t exactly sound relaxed, Gingras’s classes are distinguished by his thorough review of material and his openness to questions and dialogue.
“The quizzes and tests help them understand how much of the material they really do know,” he says. “The labs come into play with people you think you’re losing, or with shy people. Lab is often where lots of people will ‘get it’.”
Learning how to teach was one challenge. Feeding a growing family was another. Gingras started a landscape maintenance business on the side, which grew quite busy. Again, he was at a crossroads and spent time thinking and discussing prospects with his wife.
“Teaching took over,” he says now. “I’ve never woken up any morning and regretted my decision. I don’t consider this work. Even though I can teach the same course over again, it’s always new to students. I really look forward to seeing them every fall.”
Gingras is quick to point out that he isn’t alone in this belief. “The Thompson School is like a family. Professors are here because they want to be here, not for the finances. Most could make more money on their own. It’s seeing students get excited about an idea, watching them learn how to work together.”
He feels a particular spirit within the school. “Some people have the wrong idea of two-year education—they think it’s easy, but actually it’s hard! My students are only here for two years, and they need to learn as much as they can.
As he’s talking, a student enters Gingras’s office. She hands him a tape by Groove Child, a local band. They’d talked about rock during the semester, exchanged tapes, and learned about each others’ generation’s music.
The course is now long since over, but she’s made a point of tracking him down.
—Catherine Toomey, University Publications
