Immeasurable Outcomes

Gayle Greene's Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithmoffers a provocation: Good teaching matters, but it can't be measured. No one has recently captured as well as Greene the experience of being a humanities professor—what we hope to do, what happens (and doesn't) during our classes, what gives us joy, and what makes us sad. The classroom is threatened by false understandings of what can and should be assessed, by online education, and by the world's distractions. It needs to be protected.

Nothing I've read about the crisis comes close to this. I've read many of the sources Greene cites, but now I have a far clearer picture of the crucial issues and developments. What makes it work is the personal story, and most powerfully, the classroom saga. It is just brilliant. The chapters on the Shakespeare class are riveting, every one of them; they build toward the final one on Lear, which left me wishing for more; I felt like I was in the room. Greene establishes what teaching means, entails, delivers, actually is, or should be, better than anyone I've read. Yet simultaneously, she embeds that experiential narrative in state-of-the art scholarship, demonstrating simultaneously what the 'profession' demands. No one else has done this, as far as I know. Chapter 7 on WASC and the degradation of responsibility into accountability, etc., is definitive.

I loved this book. Immeasurable Outcomes not only makes the case that a liberal arts education is 'immeasurable' in our era of student learning outcomes but also describes, better than I have ever seen it described, what actually happens in a classroom. This is a knowledgeable account from a master practitioner. The descriptions of teaching moved me to tears. Immeasurable Outcomes will provide a powerful how-to guide for teachers whose life mission is to lead humane classes that can help students transform their lives.

Turn away from click-bait headlines crowing about the demise of the academy and death of the humanities and take a seat in the classroom of a world-class liberal arts professor. With passion, erudition, and wit, Gayle Greene champions a human-scale pedagogy that inspires students to discover their own worth and sense of purpose. As Greene makes abundantly clear, the value of an educated citizenry is enduring and profound. If you are considering college, know someone who is, or if you seek to defend higher education against its numerous detractors, this book is required reading.

Brushing aside the dry abstractions of academic prose, Immeasurable Outcomes is a beautiful, full-throated revelation of what actually happens in liberal arts classrooms and colleges. By turns impassioned, insightful, angry, and delighted, professor and author Gayle Greene is entranced by the actual students she teaches, furious with the destructive stupidity of educational 'reform' (NCLB, Common Core, 'assessment') and at once despairing but hopeful of what higher education does and might mean for students and teachers alike. She pulls no punches and spares no tears in this wonderful, challenging, and inspiring book.