Top Five Surprising Discoveries about the value and place of

Philosophy that I’ve learned by teaching at a community college:

1) The Heart of Philosophy is not Academic

My job means that I teach a 5-5 course-load, all intro-level, with 150 (new) students

each semester. My students come from a wide variety of social locations: the first

generation college student; the vet; the laid-off worker returning to “re-train” for a new

career; the gifted, straight-A student interested in saving money; the recovering addict;

and the full-time mom with a full-time job taking a full-time load. This sounds (and

feels, much of the time) pretty daunting.

But these students are the stuff of philosophy—struggling for meaning and self-purpose,

and for whom the choice of education is profoundly momentous…in that William James

way: a flourishing or withering, now or never, life or death (sometimes literally) choice.

For my students, philosophy is less academic than it is a place from which to engage

their inner and outer lives in ways that can help them navigate an overwhelming and

difficult world that presses in on them from multiple sides.

Teaching them helps me to explore daily what Philosophy – at its root – can do to help

cultivate and ground an engaged life and a robust citizenry.

2) Philosophy is an extrovert (even while many of us are introverts)

 because we don’t have a major at the community college, but rather serve general

education, we (almost by survival-necessity), look for connections between ourselves

and other disciplines and spheres. We spend a good deal of time advocating for,

designing our classes around, and pursuing projects that emphasize the broad role of

philosophy in education and in our lives. When we “program build,” it is about building

curricular bridges between schools. We reach out with patience and passion to embed

the place and value of philosophy, in our students’ lives and in our institutions.

Because we don’t have our own disciplinary space—our own “silo,” our own students—

we are by nature an extroverted discipline. We insert ourselves into the conversations

about General Education and Pathways, about Tenure and shared governance. We

build relationships with faculty and administrators across the college.

3) That I need to remember that Everything has Two Handles

Teaching at a CC depends on grounding your days in a kind of Stoic recognition, best

captured by Epictetus: “Everything has two handles. One by which it can be borne, one

by which it cannot be.”1 The stoic knows that our capacity to carry our burdens largely

rests on the way we pick it up: do we pick it up by the handle that is painful and

wearying, or do we pick it up by the handle that connects us to the meaning and purpose

at the heart of the struggle?

And make no mistake, it is a burden. Most philosophy professors who teach at

community colleges teach five classes a semester, each class with thirty or so new

students, each at differing levels of college readiness. We are expected to repeatedly

create extraordinary and transformative experiences for our students, and to reflect in

depth on our teaching methods and continuously develop our pedagogical and

disciplinary creds. We teach in an age when we are expected to identify, codify into

measurable units, track and assess each course outcome in triplicate. We are expected to

work on committees that serve the larger institutional mission and to be able to articulate,

at any moment, how our classroom efforts fit into those larger goals. We are expected to

substantively evaluate each other, and hold each other accountable to the professional

standards we set (which routinely ask us to specify how we will do even more—how we

will progress to the next level—in the years to come).

We are expected to do all of this in an environment where we are underpaid and where

our disparate disciplines too often fight opportunistically for FTEs and scarce resources.

Our broader cultural environment, rather than serving as a supportive backdrop, too

often is decidedly anti-intellectual, filled with hostile forces that dismiss the value of

humanities and complicate our work by exploiting our society’s basest fears.

And did I mention the grading?

The sheer weight of it all threatens to bury us daily, and so it really does matter how we

carry it. Does it destroy us to the point that we simply lose the will to carry it anymore?

Do we carry it so bitterly that we can no longer see anything good in it? Do we carry it

so secretly that from the outside it looks easy while our knees are buckling? Or do we

find the handle that makes it possible to bear.

 4) Part of finding that handle is allowing myself to understand that I get to decide

what philosophy is, just a bit more than I thought I did.

I have spent the last several years redesigning my curricula, assignments and activities around

the broader value of philosophy as a way of life.2 I have refocused my Introductory Philosophy

course on the Ancient Greek and Roman philosophies of the Good Life, for instance. I have

designed course assignments that disrupt just-a-bit the monopoly of the critical analysis paper

in order to linger on and spotlight moments of wonder, inspiration, connection, and resonance.

I have written publications in general audience journals, like the CrossFit Journal.

But professional academic philosophers tend to think (with a spark of pride, even) that

philosophy is too intellectual for the masses. Indeed, these essays were dismissed by many of my

peers and colleagues as “lowbrow”—a hobby, rather than part of my job. Where was the peer

review? Where was the prestige? But that kind of arrogance suggests that the lived experiences

that philosophy was meant to engage are irrelevant. The most prestigious “scholarly” articles I

have written feel as if I have written about the world, but not within it, unable to speak

meaningfully to anyone who was not already specially trained in my vocabulary and canon.

What I gained from the CrossFit Journal experience—of sharing something meaningful to a

broader audience, but receiving a bit of ridicule for it—was, thankfully, a bit of immunity from

other people’s views about what constitutes “real” philosophy. Writing these articles was, for

me, about giving myself permission to revise my conception of my job.

2
See my portfolio for examples of specific kinds of assignment and curricular design. http://jdsteachingportfolio.weebly.com/slcc-
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5. Never agree to do five of something that you can get away with doing 4 of.