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The other thing I have to say is that I am struggling a bit lately with my teaching. Most of the time it is great and even when class doesn’t go as I hoped, I leave excited about the conversations I have with my students and the connections they’re making.

But one class isn’t seeing the excitement, it feels like. No matter what I do, or what we talk about, the class is quiet, showing little of the interest back to me that I felt when planning it or doing the reading. The night before, as I am working on the class plans I’ll be thinking, “Oh this will be great, we’ll have a really good discussion here” and it will fall flat the next day, with little or no input from the students. I even chased them out of class the other day, frustrated with the lack of interest. To me, learning and thinking are of the utmost importance and I forget that not everyone feels that way.

I guess I am learning that I can’t get a class interested just by example. Maybe it’s too late by college to get students to be readers, but I still don’t think that’s true. I think they need to pony up and meet me halfway, true, but I also need to be doing something different — I’m just not sure what. Any suggestions you have, though, just let me know.

Am just now in the middle of going through the NYTimes list of the 100 best books of the year, something I look forward to doing every year at this time, and listing the ones I am most interested in on my Amazon wishlist. Over the course of the next months I will buy some of them, get others from the library, come across a couple of the more popular at yard sales or other random places. Some will be worth it (am just finishing Eat, Pray, Love right now and it is wonderful) and others not so much but hey, I’m willing to give them all a try. They go on the Amazon wishlist to keep me from buying them right now and so saving my money for Christmas gifts.

But today, I’m not buying nothing (unless it is more bones for the doggo). It’s Black Friday here and there are masses of people who have been at WalMart and Macy’s for hours already. Instead, Chris and I are taking part in Buy Nothing Day probably because I have enough to read but more because the ads and flyers and spam have pushed it over the top for me. Really. We’re trying to give things we made or that have some special significance this year, things that mean something more than “I was the first person on line at the department store to get this as a doorbusting early bird gift.”

Here’s the information on Buy Nothing Day. Check it out — there’s more than a little sense in the idea of living simply, I’m discovering.

We were discussing Frank McCourt’s newest book on his experiences as a high-school teacher in NYC today and we came around to the question — So why do it? Why teach? What made me and my students sign on to teaching as a career choice? McCourt makes the incredibly important point that you should do what you love and I do, I love this — but what’s the underlying point to it all? What do I believe about education and my relationship to and with my students and how this thing all works?

We write, as faculty, a philosophy of teaching statement each year and while that could be just an academic exercise, I took the plunge and wrote what I really believe. Here’s what I said:

Over this past year, my challenges were many and they all came back to one thing – how to connect what I taught my students to their lives in such a way that they found it meaningful enough to remember and use it in their own teaching. I am still pushing them to get engaged, to take on higher levels of inquiry and responsibility, and to move from passive to active learning. Many of the ways that I do that come back to how I integrate new technologies and their new literacies into the course. Sometimes it means simply getting to know my students better. All in all, my teaching is shaped by the curiosity my students and I bring to the class each session, and between them – for the subject and for learning in general. The best teaching fosters that curiosity long after the class has ended, and that’s what I am working to achieve.

30 Rock, right after The Office, is actually about product integration — as a joke (the “Hey I love this new Diet Snapple” lines) and the real — talking about GE product integration actually allows them to get the GE logo onto the show. Several times.

I am fighting a losing battle. Really I am.

We’re watching The Office right now, which is definitely damn good television, and at the commercial break there’s a quick flash of words “Check out Ellen’s new coworkers.” Which means watch this commercial for AMEX with Ellen DeGeneres where her office is full of animals. At this point, apparently, we’re now advertising the ads.. I. kid. you. not. I would say just think about that and return to your regularly scheduled programming, but should I say that without a sponsor? I mean, aren’t there commercial possibilities here?

What I am trying to say us that at this point we are not just running more and more ads, but advertising the ads. Then, in the show itself, there was a scene with a shredder and not five minutes later, a Staples ad for the same shredder. Nothing seems to be anything more or less than a vehicle for selling things, and it really bothers me — it’s overwhelming and impossible to ignore. Something to think about as we head into the largest shopping season of the year, I think.

I’ve been thinking and reading quite a lot about the middle east lately, first with Kite Runner and research on the resurgence of the Taliban and then with keeping up on the Iraq conflict. Today I read that probably at least 50 men were kidnapped at a Baghdad University (does this mean the school is not open to women? Or do the kidnappers not target Iraqii women — as at least one western female has been taken hostage over the past three years). What was even more interesting to me (and disturbing) was that the article casually mentioned that academics are often targeted. Why? What’s the threat of the University? Westernization? Iraq is now hemhorraging highly skilled and educated people, which can only stunt the country’s potential for growth and self-government. Far from being locked in an ivory castle, I think being an academic today means bridging the worlds of ideas and actions — and all countries need that. Even our own.

It’s been a while, I know. I have to figure out a better system here, one that carves out chunks of time for writing and thinking and reading in every day — even the busy ones. Lately, most have been busy ones and I run out of hours long before things to do. Plus there’s Willa. Wiggle Waggle Willa Dog is the size of a horse, or a house. Today she ate her dog bed, broke two collars, and drank half of my coffee. I’m sure there’s other things she did that I don’t know about, since Chris was home with her and I was on campus. She grins from ear to ear and is always happy — this 55-pound tail wagging bundle of joy that never slows down unless she’s asleep. I love her dearly, but if she eats another student paper I’m going to be in trouble, I know it. How do you explain to your students that *your* dog ate their homework?