Carlo Rotella is the author of the new book What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics. His other books include The World Is Always Coming to an End. He is Professor of English at Boston College.
Q: What inspired you to write What Can I Get Out of This?
A: It's a book about what happens in the classroom, what it means, what value it has. In it I tell the story of one semester of one required freshman literature class.
The semester is spring 2020, which started out as just another semester but was transformed by the covid pandemic in ways that obliged us to think hard about the value of school in general and face-to-face learning and teaching in the classroom in particular.
One of my main reasons for writing it is that the college classroom is a black box in our culture. There's no lack of strong opinions about what happens or doesn't happen there, but most of us tend to avoid the details.
And yet many people who don't spend any time in classrooms are very sure that they know what's going on in there--from lowered standards to ideological indoctrination to failure to provide return on investment or equip young people for careers.
So I thought it would be useful to open the black box and show some humans actually doing the humanities.
Also, I wanted to write about literature and about school in ways that do justice to the experience of people. Most writing about these subjects feels too abstract to me. But people's encounter with school and with literature is the opposite of that: it's immediate, full of feeling, often sweaty and uncomfortable.
So I wanted to write a book about school and about the study of literature that was full of how humans feel. I did a lot of interviewing of my students to make sure that was possible.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: A significant proportion of students in a required literature course start the semester regarding the interpretation of literature as sorcery or bullshit. So part of my job as a teacher was to show my students that this kind of analysis is a craft you can learn and master, like building a cabinet or planting a garden.
That was part of moving them from their initial reaction to having to take the course, which was often Can I get out of this?, to adding one more word to that question: What can I get out of this?
Q: The author Reeves Wiedeman said of the book, “Carlo Rotella has written a book about the art of teaching that doubles as a guide to being part of any community.” What do you think of that description?
A: Building classroom community has become much more important to me over the years. The cellphone and now AI have made college a lonelier experience than it used to be, and the pandemic accelerated the long-term waning of community on campus.
While my students are generally more professional and accomplished than my generation of college students was, they are also more anxious and isolated. So I try to make the classroom a place where they feel not just free to speak but expected to speak, responsible for doing their part as a citizen.
And the skills we're practicing in a discussion-based class--especially the delicate business of being a contributing member of the group without freeloading or taking over too much--are essential to belonging to all kinds of communities, from workplaces to families.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope that readers take away a fresh appreciation for just how much is going on in a classroom--not just between teacher and student or between student and student but in everyone's minds.
One of the most important things to me in working on this book was to interview students in depth so that I could show a reader what's going on their heads. One of the many strange things about our national conversation about higher ed is that there aren't a lot of student voices in it, and I wanted to do something to put that right.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm writing a piece for The New York Times Magazine about teaching English in the age of AI. Then I have to decide what the next book is going to be about. Maybe country music, maybe something else. Still thinking about that one.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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