If you were to walk into Torin King’s classroom right now, you would likely see her walking around in a colourful outfit, helping students with their still-life drawings. Her walls are plastered with posters of Van Gogh, Monet, Kusama, and other artists. Instrumental pop music is playing from her computer.
King has been teaching for 11 years, nearly half of which she has spent at Benson. She teaches Art, AP Art History, Leadership, and is the advisor of the Student Body Government. Outside of Benson, King loves to travel and often travels as a chaperone through EF Educational Tours, a student travel program. She has visited twenty different countries around the world, and this summer she took Benson students to Switzerland, Spain, France, and Italy, and visited Australia. “I got to go to rainforests, and the Great Barrier Reef, to two different major cities, and learn a lot of history.”
When not racking up frequent flyer miles, King is also a trivia champion, where her favorite topic is pop culture. “If it’s on a reality TV show, I’ve seen it. I am a connoisseur.” Lately, she’s been enjoying Survivor and The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. King also is a painter and an avid reader. She loves fantasy and biography, and so far this year she has read thirty books.
Before she was teaching it, King got her first taste of student leadership as a secretary for her Student Body Government when she was attending a dual enrollment program at St Petersburg College in Florida.
Now that Benson has settled into the routine of a new school year and homecoming approaches, King’s Leadership class has been busy. “This group this year is really awesome at coming up with ideas,” she said, explaining that her job is mostly to iron out the fine details and communicate with administration. “People think I have a lot more say than I do,” King continued. “I try to be as democratic as possible, […] but in reality a lot of stuff goes up above me and the administrators are a large part of the discussion.”
King shared why she loves teaching leadership – and all her other classes – so much, “I do this job, which is really really hard, because I loved school and I had amazing teachers, and school was a place where I really felt seen, heard, valued, and appreciated.”
“We want students to have a similar experience of this being their place. We want you here, we want you to be part of this community. And that drives me a lot.”
