Carlo Rotella, "What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics" (U California Press, 2025)

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: Carlo Rotella, "What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics"

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Caleb Zakren
Guest: Carlo Rotella
Date: November 18, 2025

---

Episode Overview

This episode features a rich conversation between host Caleb Zakren and author Carlo Rotella about Rotella’s new book, What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics (UC Press, 2025). The book is part memoir and part inquiry, capturing Rotella’s experiences teaching an introductory literature course ("Litcore") at Boston College during the transformative Spring 2020 semester—the period when the COVID-19 pandemic forced a shift to online instruction. The discussion navigates the skepticism of today’s students toward humanities subjects, the mechanics and joys of classroom communication, and current challenges in education, from technology and AI to participation, anxiety, and the value of literature.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Rotella’s Approach & the Book’s Structure

• Hybrid Writing Style: Rotella explains his background straddling academia (he’s an English, American Studies, and Journalism professor) and trade writing, influencing the book’s form—blending memoir, reportage, and literary analysis.

  "This book takes one class, one freshman class, one semester ... and tries to just figure out what happened in that class and what it meant." (03:14)

• Student Voices: A central aim: amplifying student perspectives, often missing from higher ed discourse. He brings profile-writing skills to bear, entering the “heads” of students rather than celebrities.

2. Teaching in a Skeptical, Professionalized Age

• Skepticism about literature’s value—vocational or otherwise—runs high:

  "[Students] are inclined to regard what happens in English class as kind of opaque, as either sort of sorcery or bullshit. And so part of my job is to show them that this is a craft. It's not mysterious..." (07:01)

• Students today are both more “professional and accomplished” (due to competitive admissions) and more anxious, isolated, and averse to awkwardness, with social media and tech compounding discomfort with participation:

  "They're much more anxious and they're much more isolated and they're much lonelier. So. And they also have a much greater horror of awkwardness, which is a sort of legacy of the cell phone..." (13:37)

3. Building Classroom Community

• Rotella details practical strategies for fostering participation, making clear that speaking up is an early and ongoing expectation—lest shyness harden:

  "If you don't talk in the first two weeks of a class, you basically won't talk. Right. A kind of writer's block sets in..." (07:01)

• Styles make fights: Drawing from boxing, he celebrates diverse participation styles. He employs writing exercises and tailored outreach to integrate quieter students while managing dominant ones.

  "I need to make room for all those kind of things ... The majority find it difficult. And there were 33 people in this class. That's a lot of people." (12:17)

4. Syllabus Design & Thematic Focus

• The course theme was “the misfit”—a relatable lens for first-year students undergoing self-remaking. Rotella selected a diverse reading list (e.g., Stuart Dybek, Edith Wharton, Junot Diaz, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion) to expose students to "different kinds of English, different kinds of language":

  "The idea was that whatever else you want to ask about a text, you can always ask ... how is this person misfitted to their social order? And what does that tell us about their social order?" (15:31)

• A central teaching method: Start with “noticing”—move from observations to patterns, then to interpretation.

  "Let's start by Lowering the bar way down to just noticing things about it, right? ... And then once we've made kind of a pile of these observations, then we start looking for patterns..." (17:46)

5. Student Struggles & Classroom Dynamics

• Classroom and personal struggles are entwined—students often wrestle with identity, confidence, and loneliness, particularly in the emotionally charged context of literature.
• Rotella shares the story of “Dan”—a standout, dissenting, working-class student who shaped classroom dynamics and modeled productive disagreement:

  "[Dan] became a very important character in the class because he modeled for other students. The fact that you don't have to just go along to get along, you know, you can..." (21:20)

6. The Pandemic’s Disruption & Online Teaching

• Rotella recounts the impact of the COVID-19 pivot to Zoom—how in-person cohesion could not be replicated online, and how Zoom’s structure stymied genuine conversation:

  "...I just kept having my normal class except on Zoom, which is very, very hard to do. It doesn't really work to have a free flowing conversation among 33 people..." (24:30)

• The years he taught solely on Zoom felt like “a lost year,” with no strong student memories or community—underscoring in-person teaching’s irreplaceable value.

7. Teaching Nonfiction and Applying Skills to the World

• Rotella strongly incorporates nonfiction ("literary journalism") and argues close reading skills are universally applicable—State of the Union addresses, movies, even neighbors' yards:

  "If a student comes out of this class understanding how form expresses meaning. We're almost ready to declare victory, right..." (28:00)

• The skillset is foundational for citizenship, not just employment:

  "These are exactly the things that we're getting an F in as a society in ways that endanger democracy, right?...these are basic citizenship skills." (31:02)

8. “What Can I Get Out of This?”: Reframing the Value Proposition

• Responding to “Why should I study literature?” Rotella offers several answers:
  • Humanities skills underlie most post-industrial work: analyzing and adding value to information.
  • Data shows lifetime earnings don't actually differ much by major.
  • The experience of “going deep” into any subject, and within a passionate community, is of highest value:

    "Pick your major by something that animates you, that gets you excited, that allows you to go deep. Because the experience of going deep on something is the important part, not what the something was." (33:48)

  • Sometimes, it’s just good to practice being interested in required tasks—it's a vital, transferable skill.

9. AI & The Value of Discussion-Based Learning

• The AI “frenzy” has reinforced Rotella’s focus on the classroom encounter as the “main event”—something that can’t be faked or automated:

  "If you write a book about what happens in the classroom ... a lot of the response of people in the humanities to the rise of AI is to actually double down on what happens in the classroom..." (37:14)

• He’s adapted his assessments (e.g., blue-book finals) to anchor evaluations in classroom discourse, which AI can’t re-create.

10. The Classroom as Community, Not Just Content

• Rotella and Zakren agree: the face-to-face classroom is a unique, increasingly precious (but unfortunately elite) space for genuine communal inquiry.
  • “You can be lectured to passively, endlessly, forever ... But it's also increasingly set up that it's, it's rarer and rarer that you get to be around other people and have their undivided attention.” (40:29)
  • The classroom is, ironically, becoming "more not less cutting edge" in its artificial, focused, and personal dynamic (41:18).
• The give-and-take of in-person discussion—impossible to replicate online—builds irreplaceable “meta-skills” for life and work:
  • “In my class, you have to contribute. Right. And that's also true at your job. If you never contribute, you get fired. Right. But you also can't dominate ... And really I haven't found another way to, to learn that meta skill other than a face to face classroom.” (44:32)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On skepticism and transparency:

  "[Students] are inclined to regard what happens in English class as kind of opaque, as either sort of sorcery or bullshit." —Carlo Rotella (07:01)

• On participation and community:

  "If you don't talk in the first two weeks of a class, you basically won't talk. Right. A kind of writer's block sets in..." —Carlo Rotella (07:01)

• On the value of close reading:

  "Form expresses meaning. That's...what we're practicing here." —Carlo Rotella (28:00)

• On the irreplaceable nature of the classroom:

  "...by far the most important part of teaching for me, which is being in a room with my colleagues, my co workers who happen to be my students, and doing this thing that you really can't ever do anywhere else..." —Carlo Rotella (26:10)

• On the link between literary skills and citizenship:

  "...the ability to work your way through a 19th century novel probably equips you to understand that that video you saw of George Soros clinking champagne flutes with Satan is probably not reliable..." —Carlo Rotella (31:02)

• On the meta-skills gained from in-person class:

  "One of the meta skills you learn is, okay, I have to contribute ... But you also can't dominate...I haven't found another way to learn that meta skill other than a face to face classroom." —Carlo Rotella (44:32)

---

Important Timestamps (MM:SS)

• 03:14 – Rotella discusses the book’s hybrid approach and focus on student perspectives.
• 07:01 – On skeptical students and the importance of demystifying literary analysis.
• 12:17 – Addressing participation challenges; most students struggle with speaking up.
• 15:31 – Syllabus design centered on the theme of the “misfit.”
• 17:46 – Rotella’s stepwise method: notice, observe, hypothesize, interpret.
• 20:51 – Addressing the personal impact of literature and classroom discussion.
• 21:20 – “Dan” as a model dissenter and catalyst for classroom community.
• 24:10–26:10 – COVID-19, Zoom teaching, and the limits of online education.
• 28:00–31:02 – Why close reading is vital for life and society, not just literature.
• 33:48 – Reframing the “Why study literature?” question for the career-oriented student.
• 37:14 & 39:15 – AI’s impact and the renewed focus on in-class discussion as “the main event.”
• 40:29–41:31 – The face-to-face classroom as a rare, elite, and valuable space.
• 44:32 – The meta-skills of balancing contribution and restraint, and why they’re uniquely learned in person.

---

Final Thoughts

This episode provides an insightful, nuanced examination of what it means to teach and learn in a humanities classroom today. Rotella’s reflections, rooted in candid classroom stories and practical teaching philosophy, offer both a celebration and a defense of the intimate, often challenging, but always transformative work of learning together in person. The book and conversation are an essential listen for educators, students, and anyone invested in the future of meaningful education.

Transcript

[Ross Shopper]

Every holiday shopper's got a list. But Ross shoppers? You've got a mission. Like a gift run that turns into a disco. Snow globe, throw pillows and PJs for the whole family. Dog included. At Ross, holiday magic isn't about spending more. It's about giving more for less. Ross, work your magic. I am so excited for this spa day. Candles lit, music on, hot tub warm and ready. And then my chronic hives come back again in the middle of my spa day. What a wet blanket looks like another spell of itchy red skin. If you have chronic spontaneous urticaria or csu, there is a different treatment option. Hives during my next spa day? Not if I can help it.

[Blinds.com Advertiser]

Learn more at [e-mail] it's not just about window treatments. It's about you. Your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfact guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. [e-mail], the only thing we treat better than Windows is you. Black Friday deals are going on all month long. Save up to 45% off site wide, plus an additional 10% off every order. Right [e-mail] rules and restrictions apply.

[Carlo Rotella]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Caleb Zakren]

I'm Caleb Zakren, editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Carlo Rotella about his recently published book, what Can I Get out of this? Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics, Carlo recounts the experience of teaching an introductory literature course known as litcore. Through his examination, he paints a portrait of what it's like to teach in our world today, highlighting the challenges faced by both students and instructors. Teaching non STEM courses today can be a challenge as students wonder aloud, what's the point of reading old books? And how can honing their skills of literary analysis lead to respectable high salaried job? Carlo's book gets at the heart of the teaching experience in an exploration that will surely appeal to ambient listeners, whether teacher or student. Carlo, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.

[Carlo Rotella]

Thanks for having me.

[Caleb Zakren]

I'm glad to talk to you. On the one hand, reading your book was a bit of whiplash for me because I think what you're describing is something that I recently experienced and especially the description of education under Covid to, uh, definitely something that I still feel like I'm Processing. I still think many of my, my peers are processing what that whole experience was like and how it really did, you know, change or make us think about what the point of, of school is. What's the point of that classroom experience where you can really be with your, your peers, be with your teachers in person and get that, you know, that learning, hands on learning experience as opposed to, you know, just logging in online, which can be great, but oftentimes it doesn't, doesn't suffice. So I found this book interesting for that reason. And I also just find that the writing itself too to be quite engaging. You know, it's published by scholarly press, but it definitely reads in a way, you know, like part memoir, part novel. So before even talking about the book, I was wondering if you'd just introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us a little about yourself.

[Carlo Rotella]

Sure. And actually the form of the book has something to do with what I do for a living in the sense that I kind of split my time. I'm a professor of English and American studies and journalism at Boston College with a PhD in an academic career. But I also spend much of my time over on the trade side writing, especially magazine profiles. I've written for the New York Times Magazine for most of the last couple of decades and I write for other magazines and this book, you know, so this book takes one class, one freshman class, one semester. And that semester is spring of 2020, which half of which was a normal semester and half of which was a crazed pandemic scramble, right. And tries to just figure out what happened in that class and what it meant. And part of the point of writing the book was to get students voices into a conversation that they're really mostly absent from, which is the conversation about higher ed. So the way I think about this book is in addition being inside my head. I have to get inside students heads and it's me taking those profile writing chops, you know, interviewing, trying to move the camera around into people's heads and applying them instead of the kind of people I usually apply them to, which is people who are famous because they're musicians or writers or boxers or whatever, applying them to a bunch of 18 year olds who are trying to get good at college and sort of alternating between deep dives into the heads of students and telling the story of the semester. So in that way way, the book is sort of a fusion of the, of the, you know, my one foot in and one foot out sort of. I managed, I could use both feet on this one.

[Caleb Zakren]

How did you come to this idea? Was this something that you've been kicking around for a while, or did it something that's kind of emerged organically?

[Carlo Rotella]

Well, part of it is what you said, that the pandemic, you know, reminded us that face to face learning and teaching can be taken away. That it's not a given, it's.

[Caleb Zakren]

It.

[Carlo Rotella]

It feels timeless when you're doing it, but in fact, it's. It's. It's something that can disapp or be taken away from us. That's part of it. And then the other part of it is that in the kind of reporting I do, I find myself really drawn to scenes where people are trying to get good at something, you know, like boxing gyms or. I like watching bands rehearse, maybe even more than I like watching bands play gigs. I like watching them rehearse, you know, and I like those scenes where everybody's working on their individual chops, and then as a community, they're trying to accomplish something. And, you know, it turns out the classroom is one of those scenes too. And it's the scene where I've spent, you know, much of my Life. I'm in 53rd grade at this point, so I've been doing this for a while, and I belatedly realized that this is exactly the kind of scene I write about. A scene where we've got everybody. You know, everybody's getting their own grade, everybody's getting their own education. But we're also trying to build this community that has what social scientists call collective efficacy. We're trying to define problems and solve them. And that feels like a team practice or a band practice or a boxing gym or these other scenes that I'm drawn to anyway.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right. That first week of class, you know, often, you know, not just that, that first lesson, though, the first lesson matters. You're trying to win over students. You know, they look at. They're looking at you. They're deciding, I suppose they have to. When it's a assigned course or when it's a mandatory course, they don't really have much of a choice. But you want to win over the students, right? Because what you establish on that first day can impact the rest of the semester. So can you talk about the first day of the class, what that was like for you and what you were trying to communicate to students?

[Carlo Rotella]

Yeah, I agree with you about that first week. And so this course is a required freshman literature course, so almost everyone at BC has to take it, but there are many, many, many sections of it. And they're all different, so they don't have to take mine. So although many of them are in there simply because of the schedule, it's at a time that there's a. There's a hole in their schedule. They're not there because of the subject matter of the professor. Right. But, so there. There's a couple things going on. One is because of the level of skepticism that you alluded to in your introduction, the skepticism about what is this going to get me? But also a fair amount of skepticism about the whole business of interpreting literature. Many of them are inclined to regard what happens in English class as kind of opaque, as either sort of sorcery or bullshit. And so part of my job is to show them that this is a craft. It's not mysterious. It's an exercise in pattern recognition. Anyone can do it, and we're going to get good at it in the way that you get good at a craft like building a cabinet. Right. Or planting a garden or something like that. So that's part of my work. But then the other thing that's really important is that I require, you know, in order to qualify for any grade at all in my classes, I require students to be regular contributors to the class. And that has to start right away. You know, I. If you don't talk in the first two weeks of a class, you basically won't talk. Right. A kind of writer's block sets in at that point that if you. If you're silent for a couple of weeks, you start thinking, even though this is. This isn't how people think, but you start thinking, if I say something, everyone's going to think, we waited six weeks, and this is all he had to say, right? Like you're raising the bar so high that you'll never speak. So another thing that's going on is I'm making sure everybody becomes a person who has spoken in class, you know, on the first day. That might just be saying what your name is and where you're from and something about your relationship to literature, but especially on the second day of class, which is the first day of actually analyzing a work of literature. Really the highest priority is that everyone speaks up. And not by going around in a circle. Rather, you have to put your hand up and say, it's my turn to talk. And the more you do that, and the earlier you do that in the semester, the less speaking in class feels like public speaking and the more it feels like being a citizen. That is, being a citizen in the sense that you are both free to speak and also expected to speak. Right. You have rights, but you also have responsibilities.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right. And different students obviously engage differently there. There are some students that, you know, could talk a lot, maybe too much. Others that, you know, like you said, might be too scared to talk, even if they have really good observations. How do you manage these different types of students in the class?

[Carlo Rotella]

Yeah, well, I think a lot about something. I spend a fair amount of time in the. In the fight world, in the boxing world, and in the boxing world, they say styles make fights. And that's definitely true of class as well.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right.

[Carlo Rotella]

That the mix of styles is what makes it interesting. So, yes, some people like to ask questions, some people like to answer questions, some people like to go first, some people like to hang back and counter punch, and some people like to talk a lot. Some people sort of very slowly make one nugget and then say it, right? So I need to make room for all those kind of things. And some of that is just on me, is kind of mechanical, varying the kind of questions I ask, varying the amount of pausing I do after I ask a question. So one thing I've learned to do fairly late in my career is since we tend to always reward the quickest and glibest students who get their hands up first, is every once in a while I'll ask a question and then say, hey, wait on this one, why doesn't everybody just take out a piece of paper and write down your thoughts for 30 seconds? And that just doing that gets different people who are maybe a little more. More of a ruminant into the game, right? And so some of it is on me or making if then statements, you know, if what so and so said is true and what so and so said is true, and what so and so said is true, then it seems to me we have a problem. And, you know, those kind of statements are. What I'm doing then is I'm modeling for the students that if you're listening to the other people in the room, you can be putting together their points to make an argument more sophisticated than one that any one of us could make. And all of those things also are about involving different kinds of students. The people who like to go first, the people who like to go last, you know, and all that stuff. And then some of it also is, you know, if a student falls silent for a class or two, I'll send them an email and say, you know, reminding you that you are expected to speak in this class. Come to my office hours and we'll, you Know, if you're having trouble getting into the flow of conversation, let's, let's work out.

[Caleb Zakren]

Let's.

[Carlo Rotella]

Let's work out a way for you to get into it. And usually it's a mechanical problem we can solve mechanically. Like, this is the first question I'm going to ask on Thursday. Write an answer out, put your hand up. I'll call on you first. Just to break the ice, just to get back in the game.

[Caleb Zakren]

I think that's actually a really great approach and definitely something where, I mean, as you say, if it's not established in the beginning that a student is going to be engaging in the classroom, then they oftentimes just won't. And while that might be fun, sometimes for the students that like to talk a lot, it ends up, I think, you know, crowding out other. Other perspectives. So I think that that's a really interesting approach.

[Carlo Rotella]

Let me also just point out that the students who like to talk a lot are in the minority.

[Caleb Zakren]

Yeah.

[Carlo Rotella]

So there were 33 students in this class. I would say something like 15 of them or 17 of them said, I am uniquely shy and I have great difficulty. And only like five or six said to me in the interviews, I love to talk in class, and I have to remind myself to shut up. Right. So. So the, the majority find it difficult. And there were 33 people in this class. That's a lot of people. Right.

[Caleb Zakren]

How, how have you seen that in terms of students, willingness to participate, change in your. In your time as a teacher?

[Carlo Rotella]

I would say that this is generalizing, but I would say generalizing. And this has to do with the sort of conditions of how you get to college at all. The students I teach are much more accomplished and much more professional than my generation of students were because they have to be to get in. You know, they basically all aced adolescence. Right. And I, I didn't go to college with anybody who aced adolescent. Well, yeah, one guy, and he ended up as Secretary of Education, so I.

[Caleb Zakren]

Don'T think I know who that is, but.

[Carlo Rotella]

Well, I was actually high school, not college. Right. So you didn't need to ace adolescence to get into college. Right. You didn't. I was a, you know, average. You know, I was very good in a couple subjects, not so good in other subjects. I had no extracurriculars, you know, and I got into places.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right.

[Carlo Rotella]

So they're more accomplished and they're more professional. They're also much more anxious and they're much more isolated and they're much lonelier. So. And they also have a much greater horror of awkwardness, which is a sort of legacy of the cell phone. You know, that that awkwardness is, you know, unimaginable and unfaceable. And it's pretty awkward to talk in class at the beginning of a semester if you don't love to talk in class. So I do have to address that the bar is a little higher to participating, especially face to face, because so much more of a young person's engagement with the world or any person engagement, but a young person's engagement with the world is through a screen or electronic in some way. So and interviewing the students that really came through loud and clear is that they were really prickly in their skins in the class at first. And part of the job of building a community is to, is to get people through that phase and into something more like I'm welcome here, people know my name here. I tend to be the person who goes first or I tend to be the person who waits and talks and that's my role in this community. And, and I'm expected to. And all of that is easing, easing that like racing heart and hot ears and dripping sweat that sometimes comes at early in the semester when you realize you have something to say.

[Caleb Zakren]

As far as the actual content of the course is concerned, the books that, that are read. Can you share a little bit about, you know, the construction of the syllabus and you know, what types of books you want it to showcase? Because it's quite a variety. You have non fiction fiction. You know, I haven't read all the books that you cover here, but I've read quite a few because I, you know, went to college and I feel like you picked a lot of the books that are picked are the types of books that you know, will, will be presented to students that take a literature course. So how did you go about constructing the syllabus?

[Carlo Rotella]

So these. So litcore, it's not a great books course, right. So it's not a sort of greatest hits of the western canon course. The idea is you pick a theme that is probably going to appeal to a bunch of 18 year olds who've just left home. So I picked the theme of the misfit, the social misfit. So we read the short stories of Stuart Diebeck, a great Chicago short story writer. Edith Wharton's the House of Mirth, Junot Diaz's the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wilde, Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loving in Las Vegas, which we paired with Joan Didion's essay Slouching towards Bethlehem, sort of two views of the counterculture of the 60s and early 70s. And the idea was that whatever else you want to ask about a text, you can always ask with these, what's the nature? You know, how is this person misfitted to their social order? And what does that tell us about their social order? And that's kind of an evergreen subject for 18 year olds, especially those kind of finding their way in college and in many cases remaking themselves. One of the, to me, most interesting things about doing this in depth interviewing for the book was asking students, where do you come from? You know, what were you like in high school? What's the nature of the do over that you are attempting in college? And there was a lot of that going on. So I tried to pick a theme that will be of general interest. And then I also try to teach just a real variety of language. You know, the diction of these books is very different. To go from Edith Wharton's the House of Mirth to Jean Diaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wilde is to get whiplash, just sentence to sentence. It's so different. And that's. I think one of the most important things you can do in an introductory literature course is just expose students to different kinds of English, different kinds of language, and that the work of extracting meaning from these different kinds of language, it feels very different.

[Caleb Zakren]

What are some of the ways that you encourage students to read, to analyze these texts? Do you have a particular approach that obviously it's not your get to have your three tips to understand all books, but obviously each book is different and needs to be approached in its own way. But, you know, what are some of the tips that you provide your students with?

[Carlo Rotella]

I think it's probably important to start by saying that I'm not teaching a content, you know, this isn't a knowledge transfer. I'm just teaching a way of coming at things, right? And the idea is that we're going to practice coming at things with these books that we've all read, but then you should go off and do it with everything else you encounter in the world, movies and books and, you know, whatever else, whatever else you encounter that has signifying form that you can interpret in order to find meaning. Um, so one of the things that I think is really important, you know, I think the most important way you teach is by modeling, right? Is by showing how you deal with a problem, showing how you deal with something. So part of the way I think about approaching a book is let's start by Lowering the bar way down to just noticing things about it, right? Like noticing word choices, images, anomalies, things that are puzzling. You know, let's not start with full blown attempts to interpret. Let's just start by noticing the form, starting with the how rather than the instead of what we think it's about, let's think of. Let's start with the how it's written. And that welcomes a lot of people into the conversation. And it allows you to start not by having a full blown interpretation, but just by paying close attention to the work. And then once we've made kind of a pile of these observations, then we start looking for patterns right in the pile. And so like in the case of the House of Mirth, which was by far, by far the most difficult book for the students and the one they hated the most, right. There's a chapter called it's okay to Hate the Book, which is about sort of jiu jitsu, like using students hatred of the book as a way to get the middle of the book. So in the case of the House of Mirth, they noticed that there's a lot of military language and a lot of language about, about hunting and there's a lot of scientific language in the book. Right. So that's just observing word choices. And then we worked that up into an analysis of the way that the main character, Lily Bart, is sometimes presented as sort of master of her own fate, you know, entrepreneur, warrior, hunter, predator. And sometimes that's kind of a helpless bit of spindrift, you know, that's being shaped by forces much more powerful than herself. But that analysis started with just. I noticed there's different kinds of word choices in, in the book. And so I really like that model. Start with noticing, build it into observations, build those observations into, you know, almost hypotheses, or build them into claims and then go looking for evidence to support the claims.

[Caleb Zakren]

As the semester goes on, you obviously learn more about the students and not only how they, you know, might be more willing to speak or not speak. You know, the students that are going to go to office hours or the ones that might not go to office hours, you know, and they're 18 year olds, you know, so 18 year olds are, you know, it's a volatile time. Many of them probably for the first time are away from home. Um, what, what, what was it like for you? Just in, as a teacher becoming aware of the struggles that students might be facing, especially given that it's a literature course. So it might be connecting with, you know, Various, various personal things in the text might be connecting students. It's not like doing math equations where everything might be maybe a bit removed from. From the emotional lives of the students.

[Carlo Rotella]

Well, that to me, has become just a more and more important part of teaching. I think that, you know, I guess when I started teaching, I might have thought of it more as like, I'm going to teach this content or these skills. And now I think of it more of as like, I figure out who's in the room, I figure out what they kind of aspire to do, maybe I give them a couple of new things to aspire to do, and then we try to do those things. Right. So. So some of, you know, much of what I learned is filtered through their in class Personas, obviously.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right.

[Carlo Rotella]

But you do get glimpses of other things and you do get glimpses of sort of where they come from and how they think about themselves. And I'm thinking about one student in particular who's called Dan in the book. I changed everybody's names in the book, although everybody gave me permission to use their real names. They were so forthcoming about their lives and their families and everything that I decided it would be easier. So there's one character, Dan, who was a real kind of loose cannon in the class, kind of a maverick in the class, and the one student who would really disagree with me and all that. And he became kind of. Everybody got interested in who Dan was. It wasn't just me. The other students were too. When I interviewed them after the semester, a lot of them said, like, yeah, you know, where did Dan get the kind of wherewithal to engage you in debate? Right. So other students are interested in who he is and who, you know, he was a business major, he was not an English major. And he just. He's the kind of guy who was. He wasn't going to get cheated out of his class participation and he wasn't going to pass up a chance to cross swords with somebody, you know. And that really came out. That Persona really came out. And then other things came out about him. He's kind of a working class background. He's from Fall River. You know, he's kind of a. Has like a regular guy, Eastern Massachusetts accent, you know, and that character, he became a very important character in the class because he modeled for other students. The fact that you don't have to just go along to get along, you know, you can. You can actually undo these, you know, nice little pat conclusions that we've come to. You can disagree with the professor and all that. In fact, there's one guy in the class who was not one of our great participators and was now in the NHL actually. And, and the semester ended, he wrote me an email, somewhat sarcastic email that said, I'm going to miss your chats with Dan. You know, so like for him, Dan loomed large one way or another.

[Caleb Zakren]

Yeah, it's always interesting certain students, especially 18 years, you know, when they're 18 years old, that don't seem to have the fear. I think that, that the fear can be very baked in of professors, you know, not wanting to go to office hours for some students, not wanting to say something that might make them look stupid, whatever that means. Obviously, you know, sometimes it's the bravest thing to do is to ask the stupid question because of course, help, help class make, make some progress. You know, reading this, as I sort of said at the outset, it was interesting because of the, the discussion. I mean this was, was not like any, any normal semester. This was the, you know, a Zoom Zoom semester. Not all of it. But can you talk about how the pandemic impacted the class?

[Carlo Rotella]

Well, so, and it wasn't, so it was just about 50, 50. We had about seven weeks of regular class and then everything shut down. And that first shut down there was like two weeks where they, where we stopped having class and then we started up on Zoom. And I had never even heard of Zoom until just until this happened.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right.

[Carlo Rotella]

And you know, frankly I, I didn't, I got a C minus as a Zoom teacher. I didn't really adjust. I just kept having my normal class except on Zoom, which is very, very hard to do. It doesn't really work to have a free flowing conversation among 33 people, 34 people, 35 if you count the TA on Zoom. So and it also wasn't a pure experience of Zoom because we had had those seven weeks together in which to get to know each other and build trust and build community. Now the following year, academic year, I taught that whole year on Zoom. So those were courses beginning to end on Zoom and those, that's the only year of teaching that I've ever had where I can't remember a single student. You know, I, I, I just, it was a kind of a lost year for me. So what the, what, what the spring of 2020 semester really showed me was just the, the gulf between doing it in person and, and, and online teaching. And frankly, you know, one, I'm not that good at online teaching and two, if I had to teach only online, I wouldn't do it, I would do something else for a living. It just removes by far the most important part of teaching for me, which is being in a room with my colleagues, my co workers who happen to be my students, and doing this thing that you really can't ever do anywhere else, which is meet regularly for 75 minutes at a time with a bunch of people who've all read the same thing, undistracted by devices, trying to figure out what it means. It's such a pleasure and such a privilege to do that that the online version doesn't really work, among other reasons, because they are. We're all on devices, so we're all infinitely distractable. When you have class on Zoom.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right.

[Carlo Rotella]

And I have this no devices, there's two policies that matter is no devices and everybody talks. And what those two policies do together is sort of make it impossible to just be a silent partner. Right. You. You have to ante up. You have to be some kind of member of this community.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right. Yeah. It's impossible to do that on. On Zoom. And, you know, I. I think I was. I was fortunate in that it was, you know, really. I was working on a, you know, senior thesis project, so I. I didn't really have that many that. I think I had two classes. So it was. It was limited the impact. But I did hear from a lot of people, especially the people that had that full Zoom year, just how. How terrible it was and how much of a waste it felt like.

[Carlo Rotella]

Yeah. And parents were not okay with paying full freight for it, and I agreed with them. I wouldn't want to pay full freight for it either.

[Caleb Zakren]

Yeah, The. The class was structured in a way where there's a focus on fiction and then moving into non fiction. I mean, you know, the. There's lots of nonfiction that is written in a very creative way. Obviously, this is the format that you're. You're used to writing into. And I personally really. I love fiction, but I really gravitate towards nonfiction, especially creative. Creative nonfiction, you know, or just nonfiction that. That. That reads well.

[Carlo Rotella]

Yeah.

[Caleb Zakren]

Could you talk about how. Moving students from interpreting fiction to nonfiction. What was that like for you? And trying to. How are you getting them to connect with nonfiction and then actually then think about the world that we. That we live in that way.

[Carlo Rotella]

I really like to do nonfiction in. In almost every literature course I teach. It's. It's a significant part of our literature. And, you know, you can reduce litcore to essentially three words. Right. Form expresses meaning.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right.

[Carlo Rotella]

That's. If. If a student comes out of this class understanding how form expresses meaning. We're almost ready to declare victory, right? And the. The nonfiction you like, especially the literary nonfiction that you like and read, teaches those lessons just as well. You know, I'm. I'm thinking of an example. We do Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The first paragraph of Slouching towards Bethlehem, almost all the verbs are in the passive voice. You know, children were missing, People were missing. It's all to be, to be, to be, to be, right? And when you. The reason they tell you not to write in the passive voice is that constantly using to be as the verb obscures the relationships between nouns, right? Children are missing, but there's no explanation as to why they're missing or who did it or whatever. So, you know, John Didion, a master of the form, obviously knows that this is the effect of passive verbs, right? So our first conversation is, why do that? Right? Why start the piece with a bunch of passive constructions that make it impossible to figure out why children are missing and people are missing? You know, what she does in Slashner's Bethlehem is she goes to Haight Ashbury to hang out with hippies in 1967 and figure out what they're up to. But she starts by saying, you know, this is this moment in America where all these things were happening and nobody could figure out why. And the way she does that is with a bunch of passive sentence constructions. So nonfiction is great for that, right? Nonfiction is just as good for that as. As teaching poetry or teaching Juno Diaz or Edith Wharton. So I'm a big fan of taking those close reading skills and using them for everything. Using for the State of the Union address, you know, using them. Teach movies, right? And, you know, this is the skill set. One of the things you can get out of your English classes is the ability to do this with everything, to do this with the news, to do this with the state of your neighbor's yard. You know, I'm close reading my neighbor's yard. He's got a car up on blocks. What's that about? You know, like, does. Am I interpreting a disrespect for his neighbors or a deep love of mechanics, right? You use these skills all the time. And so part of the way I wanted to structure the course is that we're going to practice on fiction, but then we're going to segue towards the end of the semester, via nonfiction, to the larger world that we're, you know, sort of going out to inhabit with this newly stocked toolkit And I feel.

[Caleb Zakren]

Like in many ways that's the answer to the question that the title poses, you know, what can I get out of this? Which is that it, it basically teaches you how to analyze, how to read your everyday life. Obviously, like trying to impart the, the love of literature on students is, is part of the goal too, because it's a great way to pass the time. So, you know, that's one thing and something that, that, that I, I worry about that, you know, more and more people just don't see the point of, of reading because it's not as necessarily immediately exciting as, you know, Instagram it might, might feel or as movies or TV might, might be. But when you really, when you really commit to a book and get deep into it, it can be like the most gratifying experience.

[Carlo Rotella]

And, and yeah, so yes, the skill set, right, of extracting meaning from the world is one you're going to need no matter what you do for a living. I mean, that's basic equipment, right? For a citizen, for a worker, for, for any thinking person. I'll also point out that the things you do, you know, quintessentially when you're reading, evaluating the reliability of what you're reading based on what you read before, understanding the viewpoint, the perspective of another person, these are exactly the things that we're getting an F in as a society in ways that endanger democracy, right? That, you know, the ability to work your way through a 19th century novel probably equips you to understand that that video you saw of George Soros clinking champagne flutes with Satan is probably not reliable. It's the, those two things fit together very nicely, right? And so, I mean, it is, it is basic equipment. And I guess the way I would say it is we practice on literature, we practice these skills on literature which is expressly designed to carry meaning. So that when we go out into the world, yes, we read more literature, but we also practice on things that are perhaps more obscurely designed to carry meaning. Or not only designed to carry meaning, but remember, this semester is the spring of 2020. Donald Trump was the president in the spring of 2020 still, right? And he had gotten elected essentially by repeating a set of three word phrases, right? Drain the swamp, build the wall. Right? And then he would add, stop the steal later also lock her up, right? He had these three word, three syllable phrases that he just endlessly repeated, right? One of the things we did in class on the very first day of class is we talked about two, three word phrases. The first sentence of Moby Dick, call me Ishmael and build the wall. And what we were talking about is just how much meaning gets piled into those three words. You know, build the wall doesn't just mean we should build a wall on the border with Mexico and Mexico should pay for it. It means, you know, you are disappointed by, by the way American life has worked out for you. And let's agree to blame these people. Like, how can you know, it's just three words, it doesn't even have any punctuation. Right? So it's not like these are esoteric skills that only, you know, rich people with the luxury and free time can afford to hone. These are just, these are basic citizenship skills.

[Caleb Zakren]

Yeah, absolutely. And I also wonder too, you know, when students are, you know, thinking about their future, thinking about, you know, how they're going to get a job, does that ever come up directly? You know, do students, do students ever point blank ask you these questions and, you know, what do you say to them? I mean, obviously I think you, you, you've kind of already answered it. But you know, I'm curious, like when this actually, when it comes, they're actually like, why should I study literature?

[Carlo Rotella]

Yeah, well, I have a couple answers to that. One answer has to do with the nature of college, right? So essentially what you're doing in college, almost no one in college is planning to work on the line in a factory, right? What most people are planning to do in college is do some kind of post industrial work. And what that work pretty much consists of for the most part is getting a pile of information, adding value to it somehow with analysis and then expressing that analysis. Right. That's, that's the kind of work that most people in college are planning to do. You know, sort of information handling services. That's what they're planning to do and that's what they're practicing in college. And you can practice on Edith Wharton, or you can practice on astrophysics, or you can practice on international relations, but you're basically practicing the skill of dealing with a pile of information, adding value with analysis and expressing that analysis. Right? That's one answer. The other answer, which is the best kept secret in higher education, is that there actually is very little difference in lifetime earnings between the different majors, which is something apparently that, you know, is being kept secret from the American people. And that you don't pick your major by lifetime earnings because they're kind of the same. You know, anthropology, finance, it works out about the same. So pick your major differently. Pick your major by something that animates you, that gets you excited, that allows you to go deep. Because the experience of going deep on something is the important part, not what the something was. And I would also argue the company in which you did it, that's more important than what. Than what you actually decided to go deep on. So those are ways of saying, you know. And I guess there's a third thing I would answer to that. The third thing I say is it's really good for you to have some things that you just have to do, and you need to get the most out of them, because sometimes in life you have a lot of choice, and sometimes you don't. And you have to take this course, and it's your job to find a way to be interested in it. And learning how to be interested in things is a skill that you can develop, and that's crucial to your success in the world. It's also a private university. I'm not teaching at a public high school, so I can say, if you don't like it, just take another class. You know, and there are people who can't say that. There are teachers who are not in a position to say that. But I can say, listen, you are paying literally $5aminute for classes at Boston College. If this isn't your thing to go somewhere else, take another section or don't go to college or whatever, you know, and that's a luxury that teaching at a private university that charges a lot of money allows me to. To have that I recognize not every teacher has.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right. Yeah. I think that, you know, obviously college is not accessible to everyone, and not everyone gets to have the experience of getting to read these books and have someone, you know, like you who can basically show them. Here's how you might think about it. Not here's how you have to think about it, but here's how you might go through the book. Here's how you might treat sentences. Here's how you might think about why someone might break particular rules. I find that to be really valuable, you know, learning. You know, just kind of learning by example. You know, it's like being a sous chef in a way, for someone, but in a different way, different context. I'm wondering, now that you've written this book, how it's impacted your teaching. Do you find that you're approaching the classroom differently at all than you were before you wrote it?

[Carlo Rotella]

Well, I think probably so. Some of it has to do with writing the book, and some of it has to do with the timing of the book. This is Not a book about AI. AI gets a paragraph at the beginning where I say, this is not a book about AI. But AI is sort of offered another context, another frame for the book once it came out, since it came out, you know, at the beginning of this fall, in the middle of an AI frenzy. So I think one of the things, you know, if you write a book about what happens in the classroom, right. That in the particular moment, a lot of the response of people in the humanities to the rise of AI is to actually double down on what happens in the classroom. So I think I've, if anything, just put more and more emphasis on the 2,000 minutes we spend together as the main event. So I'm giving Blue Book midterms and finals for the first time in this millennium, this semester. And those, those mid. The midterm and the final are both pretty much exclusively about the reading and what we did with it in class, which is another way that I can signal what happens in class is the main event. And you can't AI a Blue Book final yet.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right. We'll see.

[Carlo Rotella]

We'll see what happens with wearables. But at the moment you can't.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right.

[Carlo Rotella]

So I think what has happened is that AI has given me a hard shove further in the direction the book was going, which is to say what happens in class between us is the main event. Even papers are secondary to that. And the deliverables, like exams are designed to focus on what happens in class as the main event. And I also feel that that's sort of our technological moment. Any of us can be lectured to endlessly online by talking heads, but what we can get is a bunch of other human beings who've all read the same thing and are committed to getting some meaning out of it. And I feel like in a humanities class, you're paying for the admissions policy and you're paying for the hiring and promotion policy that produce the other people in the room, and that's kind of it. So that my teaching should really reflect that. I basically don't lecture anymore. I basically just run discussions.

[Caleb Zakren]

I think that's so true. And I've really felt that with AI. And it's just growing prevalence in the fact that students can basically do what they want with it outside of the classroom, that it will only further show the importance of a Socratic style classroom environment. Students getting to ask questions, having to think on their feet, having to actually engage with people face to face. I don't think that there is a replacement for it even. You know, the only replacement for It, I guess, is reading a really good book and having that engagement. Though of course, the person that you're speaking with doesn't necessarily, you know, might be speaking to you through time and they might, they might have, they might be long dead and they might, you know, they might say, well, that's not what I meant by that. But, but you know, I think that, that there really isn't any replacement. I constantly feel, you know, this, this sense, this longing for that, you know, 10 person classroom experience of getting to just, you know, really hash it out with, you know, with, with my peers and with, with my teacher. So, you know, I don't think back on the lectures and miss those because I can just go on YouTube and find them.

[Carlo Rotella]

You can be. Our culture is really set up for you to be lectured to passively, endlessly, forever. Right. But it's also increasingly set up that it's, it's rarer and rarer that you get to be around other people and have their undivided attention. I mean, you know, once you leave college, unless you go to grad school, it's probably never going to happen again. Certainly is not the case. In any meeting I've ever been in, people are always on their phones, always doing something else in a meeting. It's really, I mean, class is really becoming a very artificial environment in the best possible way where there's, you know, there's no devices, they're just us. I have a colleague at, a former student who's now a professor at UMass and she requires eye contact, which makes students quite uncomfortable, you know. You know, like, is that stalkerish? It's like, well, no, actually it's how humans communicate.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right.

[Carlo Rotella]

So I do really think, I guess one of the points I make in the book is that I think the classroom is getting more, not less cutting edge, the face to face classroom as it becomes this rarer and more precious thing and unfortunately this more elite thing.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right.

[Carlo Rotella]

Because it, you know, as you, as you move towards less selective schools and they have more classes online, more asynchronous classes, more large classes. Right. So it's really at the fancier, more selective places where you can still, you know, with just what you said, 10 people in a room. Right. There's plenty of schools that will cancel a class if only 10 people sign up.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right.

[Carlo Rotella]

But there's still a few left where it's like 10 people's the perfect number.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right? Yeah. I always felt when I was considering what I should major in that the reason I, I gravitated more to you know, humanities and social sciences was because I felt that, you know, while I'm here, I want that classroom experience. And, you know, when it comes to the, to maths and sciences, I was never, you know, steady enough, I think, to work in a, in a lab. I think I'd spill everything. But, you know, just, just sitting in on, on lectures all the time, like, do that on your own. And that's always. Sometimes, you know, the argument that I make when I'm talking to people about what, you know, when they're trying to figure out, younger people, when they're trying to figure out what they should major in, is I say do the thing that you can't do elsewhere. You know, if you can, you know, if you can't get that classroom experience, you know, if you can, you can learn all of math online. Now, you can't learn how to analyze a novel on by, you know, I mean, I guess you maybe kind of can undo it online, but I mean, you can't. You're probably the same. It's just not the same.

[Carlo Rotella]

But that's also not the same as analyzing a novel as part of a community. Right? Which is a very distinct thing. And so one of the things about Class on Zoom that really struck me was that it's not like that Class on Zoom, even a discussion feels more like a David Mamet play. Like, you make a speech, then somebody else makes a speech, then I make a speech, and they're thematically related, but it's not at all like, you know, in a flesh and blood classroom, in a face to face classroom, somebody says something and that causes somebody else to react and raise their hand. And I said, you want to respond to what he said? And she says, yeah, I do. And then, you know, somebody interrupts. And then, you know, it's like, that is not cosmetic. That is actually the process of participating in a community that's arriving at an analysis that is greater than the sum of its parts. So I think if class is going well, it should feel like a band practice or a team practice. It should feel. It should have that feel to it. And you should be able to fail. And you should also be able to do very small, partial things. You know, on the paper, you have to do everything, get all the evidence, make all the arguments, explain everything. But in class, you can just contribute a little bit of this, a little bit of that. So class should feel kind of workshoppy, right? And that's kind of hard to do online. You know, it's very easy to have very strong opinions that you sort of fire off into the electronic void. But it's hard to, you know. For instance, one of the things I think you learn in a discussion class, one of the meta skills you learn is, okay, I have to contribute. Like in my class, you have to contribute. Right. And that's also true at your job. If you never contribute, you get fired. Right. But you also can't dominate.

[Caleb Zakren]

Right.

[Carlo Rotella]

You can't dominate to the point that other people can't contribute. So it's a very important meta skill. And really I haven't found another way to, to learn that meta skill other than a face to face classroom.

[Caleb Zakren]

Yeah, I think it'll be a while before AI figures that one out. But, you know, in the meantime, I really do think that, that listeners should go and they should, they should check out your book, especially teachers or people that are, you know, grad students that, that are, you know, maybe stepping into their first ever teaching roles. I think thinking about how to best engage students, how to, you know, really emphasize participation, I, I think the book does a really good job of working through that. And I think no matter, you know, what the discipline is, I think people could find it very valuable and a useful guide for them. So, yeah, Carla was really wonderful to get the chance to speak with you about your book. I really enjoyed our conversation.

[Carlo Rotella]

Yeah, me too. And thanks, thanks so much for the. In the opportunity to talk about it in depth.

[Caleb Zakren]

Of course. Yeah.