9/23/25 Carlo Rotella "What Can I Get Out of This?"

Our guest is Dr. Carlo Rotella, Professor of English at Boston College, talks about his newly published memoir "What can I Get Out of This? - Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics." Rotella talks about the experience of teaching a course that is affectionately known by BC students as "Core Lit" - an English literature survey course that all freshmen at the college must take..... exactly the sort of liberal arts course that some might view as fairly meaningless if not downright useless if they regard a college education as nothing more than job preparation. Rotella persuasively argues in his book that a course like "Core Lit" offers tremendous benefits to any student, no matter what their post-college aspirations happen to be. By the way, the semester that Rotella focuses on was the spring semester of 2020, which coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread shutdown that drastically altered every aspect of our lives, including that of the classroom.