In this task, you are given a list of integers and an integer k. You need to find the kth smallest element in the input list and return that.
Q: [72, 285, 153, 18, 207, 96, 39, 37, 113, 237, 156, 56, 270, 134, 279, 32, 181, 211, 55, 17], k=12
A: 
153