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Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm
What is the purpose of education? The answer might be found in a Shakespeare class at a small liberal arts college. In this engaging account of teaching a Shakespeare class at a small liberal arts college, Gayle Greene illustrates what is so vital and urgent about the humanities. Follow along with Greene as she introduces us to her students and showcases their strengths, needs, and vulnerabilities, so we can experience the magic of her classroom. In Immeasurable Outcomes, Greene's class builds a complex human ecosystem that pushes students to think more deeply and discover their own interests and potential, all while recognizing the inherent dignity in other people's views and values. Grounding her analyses in half a century of teaching, Greene pushes back against the demand for measurable student learning outcomes and the standardization imposed on K-12 schools in the name of reform. Instead, she draws her conclusions about education directly from the students themselves. Alumni testimonials describe the transformative power of a liberal arts education, recounting how their experience of community and engagement has provided them the tools to navigate the uncertainties of a rapidly changing world while also inspiring the social awareness our democracy depends on.
Immeasurable Outcomes rejects claims that the liberal arts are impractical, exposing the political agendas of technocrats and ideologues who would transform higher education into vocational training and programs focused only on profitability. Greene reminds us that the liberal arts have been the basis for the most successful educational system in the world and provides a powerful demonstration that education at a human scale that is relationship-rich and humanities-based should be the model for education in the future.
Immeasurable Outcomes rejects claims that the liberal arts are impractical, exposing the political agendas of technocrats and ideologues who would transform higher education into vocational training and programs focused only on profitability. Greene reminds us that the liberal arts have been the basis for the most successful educational system in the world and provides a powerful demonstration that education at a human scale that is relationship-rich and humanities-based should be the model for education in the future.
- GenresEducation
384 pages, Hardcover
Published January 17, 2023
9 people are currently reading
80 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 4, 2023
The author has a lot of interesting things to say, and the book is incredibly thoughtfully written - a deep self-ethnography of the complexities of teaching one class, very satisfying to read.
She talks about her goals and how they differ from the kind of "accountability" the corporate university is requiring from her, to turn the students into cogs in the global economy. Instead, she wants to help them "grow into sane, whole, responsible human beings who make choices that genuinely benefit themselves and the world" (29) Unfortunately, she too seldom questions whether it is ethically right or fair to want/expect students to go into lifelong debt peonage for that privilege, whether there might be less personally costly ways to achieve those ends.
Pointing to her own experience at City College, she cites data that 76% of students who enroll come from the bottom fifth of the income distribution and end up in the top 3/5 (58). Which just goes to show that higher ed is being punished for its own success: "It was producing, Newfield says, 'wave after wave of well educated and potentially independent, intellectually active people who seemed to have lost their reflexive respect for authority,' turning out, by 1980, 'nearly a million graduates a year.' By the late 1960s, corporate America was losing its hold. Public education had created 'a restive middle class' that was laying 'greater claim to the country's future.' It had to be stopped. Look what happens when you educate people: they get uppity. They begin to assume they're entitled to a living wage, job protections, benefits. They start asking for government programs to improve their own and others' quality of life, "entitlements to promote a fairer distribution of wealth." (58). Except that all audible/visible and successful US requests for such things happened long before the rise of higher ed -- in about 1935-1942. And the Civil Rights movement happened before most boomers graduated from college, even if its leaders had profited from the GI Bill increase in college-going, which they did not due to segregation in the military. So she hasn't actually provided much evidence that college-going increased that kind of social justice behavior. There's some evidence for Democratic voting among the college-educated, but that long post-dates the point she seems to be making/the time when higher ed began to be defunded, in the early 1980s.
68- yes, and, I get tired of the easy pieties, there's some truth in what she says, but some willful ignorance about actual realities: "No longer is higher education about human development and the betterment of society; it's about the economy. . . . Greed was not good in the years I was growing up. Corporations prided themselves on fairness and accountability to their employees and communities. Civic services were not seen as 'handouts' to 'moochers' 'public and 'welfare' were not dirty words." Well, actually, those things were fought vehemently, by the Liberty League and others, from the moment Social Security was invented. Greed had been good -- it had been busted a bit by the progressives in the early 1900s, mostly by wealthy women, most of whom hadn't been to college, and progressive early social workers etc., many of whom had. This is really polemic, broad strokes, not a "critical thinking" kind of argument. But it feels really nice, and makes those of us in higher ed feel good about ourselves, I guess.
Research shows students retain less from reading on screens; from what she's seen, they seem to retain nothing: Jill Barshay, "Evidence Increases for Reading with Paper instead of screens" Hechinger Report, August 12, 2019: https://hechingerreport.org/evidence-...
Students feel behind, without enough time or sleep, "A dean of students at Pomona described it this way: 'Their sense of entitlement has been pumped sky high, while their actual prospects are falling, and that makes for a kind of craziness." No citation, but wow, perfect.
Re: trigger warnings, she says no: "I get it, students are in a low-level hysteria about their futures, and it's easier to complain about that insensitive thing somebody said, that upsetting thing we read, than to tackle the forces that are stealing their futures" (97). She argues that the enemy is the neighborhoods presumably nearby that house mostly people of color, "the shuttered buildings, read about the theft of public education and public resources, the wealth gap, the opportunity gap, then we can talk about how unsafe you feel here. Your enemy is not this college, where most of the staff and faculty are earnestly working for social justice" -- umm, how? Not in the students admitted. Not by actively opposing the $1.71T in student debt (92). So tone deaf. So unaware of the deadliness of slow violence as well as fast. So sure that racism lies where the people of color are, not where the wealthy white people are, as though a problem is located in its victims and not its perpetrators. I sort of get what she's saying. Still.
Argues that we can't just make up whatever we want, though each of us "constructs our own Shakespeare" it doesn't mean anything goes. That "the tragedies are object lessons in [characters who read others] badly" (121).
The Common Core has removed literature, which they get in fragments from which they are to extract character motivations/lifeless fatures. And under the Common Core, test scores have flattened (131).
About Taming of the Shrew, she talks with the class about order, patriarchy, how hierarchies get clamped down on just as they're opening up, but that she insists students read in context, "read the play, not raid it" 143. About how we're all playing roles, gender, polar bear and husky - how the husky playing changed the situation.
On the joys of seeing live theatre, "I came away feeling, thats' what we love about Shakespeare, he makes us feel good about being human . . . I don't know how else to sai it, just glad to be a par tof it, humanity in all its silliness, splendor, squalor, sordidness, grandeur, outrageousness. Not hte warm, fuzzy feeling fof a feel-good movie where the bad guys turn good or turn out not to have been badk, 'triumph of the human spirt" . . . b/c he gets it all, the whole wide range, the greed, nastiness, brutishness, along with what's fine and noble in us. Something to do with what Marilynne Robinson calls 'the old humanist join in what people are' (though sheesh, Robinson - she was once verbally abusive to some volunteers who were talking about climate change at her church, and her first book, about nuclear power, was what used to pass for unhinged.) (167).
The Hobart Shakespeareans, documentary about Rafe Esquith and teaching (168).
"Discussion 'can envelop the mind in multiple perspectives,' says Andrew Delbanco, give a sense of 'truth in flux, in the making rather than the ready made,' a creating students have a part in. That does not mean that anything goes, anybody's 'personal belief' or 'personal opinion' is as good as any other, but it does mean that the kind of knowledge that comes from a discussion is qualitatively different from what comes from a lecture." (170) Chomsky: it's not what we cover but what you discover.
This kind of thing makes me so annoyed: "It is not to the credit of higher education that we have tolerated this external assault on our work,' says John Powell, assessment overseer at Humboldt State: "Its origins are suspect, its justifications abjure the science we would ordinarily require, . . . and it displaces and distracts us from more urgent tasks.'" Well, maybe. But if you're asking someone to enter debt peonage for some number of decades, probably there should be some external justification? These "we should police ourselves" things ring hollow, like the same claims from the Supreme Court. (227).
She talks about her goals and how they differ from the kind of "accountability" the corporate university is requiring from her, to turn the students into cogs in the global economy. Instead, she wants to help them "grow into sane, whole, responsible human beings who make choices that genuinely benefit themselves and the world" (29) Unfortunately, she too seldom questions whether it is ethically right or fair to want/expect students to go into lifelong debt peonage for that privilege, whether there might be less personally costly ways to achieve those ends.
Pointing to her own experience at City College, she cites data that 76% of students who enroll come from the bottom fifth of the income distribution and end up in the top 3/5 (58). Which just goes to show that higher ed is being punished for its own success: "It was producing, Newfield says, 'wave after wave of well educated and potentially independent, intellectually active people who seemed to have lost their reflexive respect for authority,' turning out, by 1980, 'nearly a million graduates a year.' By the late 1960s, corporate America was losing its hold. Public education had created 'a restive middle class' that was laying 'greater claim to the country's future.' It had to be stopped. Look what happens when you educate people: they get uppity. They begin to assume they're entitled to a living wage, job protections, benefits. They start asking for government programs to improve their own and others' quality of life, "entitlements to promote a fairer distribution of wealth." (58). Except that all audible/visible and successful US requests for such things happened long before the rise of higher ed -- in about 1935-1942. And the Civil Rights movement happened before most boomers graduated from college, even if its leaders had profited from the GI Bill increase in college-going, which they did not due to segregation in the military. So she hasn't actually provided much evidence that college-going increased that kind of social justice behavior. There's some evidence for Democratic voting among the college-educated, but that long post-dates the point she seems to be making/the time when higher ed began to be defunded, in the early 1980s.
68- yes, and, I get tired of the easy pieties, there's some truth in what she says, but some willful ignorance about actual realities: "No longer is higher education about human development and the betterment of society; it's about the economy. . . . Greed was not good in the years I was growing up. Corporations prided themselves on fairness and accountability to their employees and communities. Civic services were not seen as 'handouts' to 'moochers' 'public and 'welfare' were not dirty words." Well, actually, those things were fought vehemently, by the Liberty League and others, from the moment Social Security was invented. Greed had been good -- it had been busted a bit by the progressives in the early 1900s, mostly by wealthy women, most of whom hadn't been to college, and progressive early social workers etc., many of whom had. This is really polemic, broad strokes, not a "critical thinking" kind of argument. But it feels really nice, and makes those of us in higher ed feel good about ourselves, I guess.
Research shows students retain less from reading on screens; from what she's seen, they seem to retain nothing: Jill Barshay, "Evidence Increases for Reading with Paper instead of screens" Hechinger Report, August 12, 2019: https://hechingerreport.org/evidence-...
Students feel behind, without enough time or sleep, "A dean of students at Pomona described it this way: 'Their sense of entitlement has been pumped sky high, while their actual prospects are falling, and that makes for a kind of craziness." No citation, but wow, perfect.
Re: trigger warnings, she says no: "I get it, students are in a low-level hysteria about their futures, and it's easier to complain about that insensitive thing somebody said, that upsetting thing we read, than to tackle the forces that are stealing their futures" (97). She argues that the enemy is the neighborhoods presumably nearby that house mostly people of color, "the shuttered buildings, read about the theft of public education and public resources, the wealth gap, the opportunity gap, then we can talk about how unsafe you feel here. Your enemy is not this college, where most of the staff and faculty are earnestly working for social justice" -- umm, how? Not in the students admitted. Not by actively opposing the $1.71T in student debt (92). So tone deaf. So unaware of the deadliness of slow violence as well as fast. So sure that racism lies where the people of color are, not where the wealthy white people are, as though a problem is located in its victims and not its perpetrators. I sort of get what she's saying. Still.
Argues that we can't just make up whatever we want, though each of us "constructs our own Shakespeare" it doesn't mean anything goes. That "the tragedies are object lessons in [characters who read others] badly" (121).
The Common Core has removed literature, which they get in fragments from which they are to extract character motivations/lifeless fatures. And under the Common Core, test scores have flattened (131).
About Taming of the Shrew, she talks with the class about order, patriarchy, how hierarchies get clamped down on just as they're opening up, but that she insists students read in context, "read the play, not raid it" 143. About how we're all playing roles, gender, polar bear and husky - how the husky playing changed the situation.
On the joys of seeing live theatre, "I came away feeling, thats' what we love about Shakespeare, he makes us feel good about being human . . . I don't know how else to sai it, just glad to be a par tof it, humanity in all its silliness, splendor, squalor, sordidness, grandeur, outrageousness. Not hte warm, fuzzy feeling fof a feel-good movie where the bad guys turn good or turn out not to have been badk, 'triumph of the human spirt" . . . b/c he gets it all, the whole wide range, the greed, nastiness, brutishness, along with what's fine and noble in us. Something to do with what Marilynne Robinson calls 'the old humanist join in what people are' (though sheesh, Robinson - she was once verbally abusive to some volunteers who were talking about climate change at her church, and her first book, about nuclear power, was what used to pass for unhinged.) (167).
The Hobart Shakespeareans, documentary about Rafe Esquith and teaching (168).
"Discussion 'can envelop the mind in multiple perspectives,' says Andrew Delbanco, give a sense of 'truth in flux, in the making rather than the ready made,' a creating students have a part in. That does not mean that anything goes, anybody's 'personal belief' or 'personal opinion' is as good as any other, but it does mean that the kind of knowledge that comes from a discussion is qualitatively different from what comes from a lecture." (170) Chomsky: it's not what we cover but what you discover.
This kind of thing makes me so annoyed: "It is not to the credit of higher education that we have tolerated this external assault on our work,' says John Powell, assessment overseer at Humboldt State: "Its origins are suspect, its justifications abjure the science we would ordinarily require, . . . and it displaces and distracts us from more urgent tasks.'" Well, maybe. But if you're asking someone to enter debt peonage for some number of decades, probably there should be some external justification? These "we should police ourselves" things ring hollow, like the same claims from the Supreme Court. (227).
May 14, 2023
One of the most resonant, heart-felt arguments for what teachers do and the meaning of the humanities that I have read in a long time. Come for the insights about teaching and stay for the Shakespeare. Or come for the Shakespeare and stay for the teaching. Either way, it’s an important read for a dark moment in higher ed.
March 24, 2024
A beautiful,rambling discourse on teaching. Greene begins by laying the foundation of recent changes in education under her story— an accurate synopsis of issues and values. She tells us her history in teaching, and what she hopes to accomplish.
Then she takes us into her classroom, where the decision-making and instant judgements are deftly woven into discussions. How do we get students to stretch? Greene shares her bag of discussion tricks.
But what has happened to academic freedom, the ability to tailor teaching to diverse classes? The standardization folks— and why they’re wrong.
Like I said, the book rambles, combining rationale and critique plus a pitch for small, liberal arts colleges. But the non-linear structure makes the book feel like a conversation with a master teacher; it’s part of the book’s appeal.
Five stars.
Then she takes us into her classroom, where the decision-making and instant judgements are deftly woven into discussions. How do we get students to stretch? Greene shares her bag of discussion tricks.
But what has happened to academic freedom, the ability to tailor teaching to diverse classes? The standardization folks— and why they’re wrong.
Like I said, the book rambles, combining rationale and critique plus a pitch for small, liberal arts colleges. But the non-linear structure makes the book feel like a conversation with a master teacher; it’s part of the book’s appeal.
Five stars.
June 4, 2023
A delightful book for educators, Immeasurable Outcomes is one part memoir, one part passionate defense of the humanities. Professor Greene traces her life as a reader, scholar, and teacher, using that narrative to ground a story of the decline and fall of literature as an academic endeavor, plus a rallying cry for all of us to revalue the humanities as central to academic and social life.
We hosted her on the Future Trends Forum, where she was a great guest.
We hosted her on the Future Trends Forum, where she was a great guest.
December 5, 2024
Excellent account that humanizes teaching, revealing its complexity and the compassion it takes. Interspersed with riveting accounts of classroom encounters are passionate arguments against the neoliberal, assessment-driven reforms that are ruining secondary and higher education in our country (Gates Foundation and Spellings Commission are subjected to particularly brutal and deserved take downs). Just reading how this master teacher resides in her classroom, gently guiding her students through treasures of the human artistic spirit has given me a new perspective on my own teaching. I highly recommend this book to other teachers in the liberal arts and anyone who cares about the future of higher education.
January 14, 2025
A very sobering and scary look at the state and future of education in this country and the consequences that have occurred from the Corporate interests in measurable outcomes. This book gives a strong case for liberal arts education and contrasts the 1950s and 1960s when States and the public supported education with today.
I wish policy makers would all read this book.
I wish policy makers would all read this book.
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August 1, 2024DNF at 26% the older white lady vibes just got to be too much.
October 17, 2024
I am a little over a year retired and this brought back all the frustrations and joys of teaching, expressed so many of my concerns for higher education that I write about @ heymrswinkler.com--validation!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews