All Happy Classrooms (guest post)

Are all happy classrooms alike? Probably not. But perhaps there’s some qualities common to many of them. In the following guest post, Daniel Story, assistant professor of philosophy at California Polytechnic State University, suggests that among those qualities are care and connection. His experiences teaching this semester push against the dominant pessimistic narrative about today’s college students and their ability and willingness to read, to think, to do the work. Read on, and perhaps you’ll be inspired to take a different approach to your teaching. All Happy Classrooms by Daniel Story Once a week, I sit in a circle with 20 students and participate in a discussion about the love lives of the rich and powerful. I’m teaching a 10-week undergraduate philosophy seminar on love and care, and we’re reading Anna Karenina alongside several hundred pages of philosophical texts. On Karenina days, I listen and occasionally chime in. We talk about whether the adulterous Oblonsky loves his wife, how the teetotaling Levin can be friends with dissolute aristocrats, whether Anna’s husband drove her away with aloofness. We discuss to what extent the philosophers’ tidy accounts of love grip Tolstoy’s muddy intricacies. We imagine Vronsky on the apps. The conversation winds along circuitous paths. This shouldn’t really be possible. We’ve all seen the headlines. Students can’t read books anymore. Students can’t read sentences anymore. Diagnoses vary, but everyone agrees that the central culprit is technology: “Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube.” Yet most of my students are reading well over one hundred pages per week. I know they are reading because of the character of our discussions, which are filled with interpretive disagreement, fixation on details, forgetfulness that brings us to our books. There is much speculation about how things will turn out. I know they are reading (and when they are not) because of the in-class writing assignments I give them. I know because I watch bookmarks and spine creases advance each week. I know because my colleagues report that their students are reading Tolstoy during class breaks. I know because I see my students read beside me on picnic blankets in the reading sessions I host on the campus lawn. Either the headlines are.. The post All Happy Classrooms (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.