
What Can I Get Out of This?
Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics
- 224 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
A Forbes Best Higher Education Book Of 2025
An eloquent and moving story about the value and the pleasures of intellectual exploration—and why it matters beyond the classroom.
At a time when college students and their parents often question the "return on investment" from humanities courses, accomplished feature writer and English professor Carlo Rotella invites us into the minds of a group of skeptical first-year students who are ultimately transformed by a required literature class.
In What Can I Get Out of This? he follows thirty-three students through his class to provide an intimate look at teaching and learning from their perspectives as well as his own. The students' reluctance—"How does this get me a job?"—transforms into insight as they wrestle with challenging books, share ideas, discover how to think critically, and form a community. In all these ways, they learn how to extract meaning from the world around them, an essential life skill. Confronting skeptics of higher education, this compassionate and inspiring book reveals the truth of what students actually experience in college.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- 1. A Quick Look Inside Our Heads Before We Begin
- 2. The First Day
- 3. Citizens
- 4. Noticing
- 5. Icebergs
- 6. It’s Okay to Hate the Book
- 7. Speaking Up
- 8. Unreliable Narrators
- 9. Surprise Midterm
- 10. True Stories on Zoom
- 11. Outcomes
- Afterword: A Note on Sources and Choices
- Acknowledgments
- Reading List
- Index