My students often ask me, What is sociology?

I was sitting peacefully in class listening to the teacher that day when we heard them come.

On May 1, 2004, I celebrated EU enlargement with my students.

Because my students, what they said when they looked upon the world, and I asked them, What do you really think about the world?

And then I ask my students, I've asked them over the last two years I've asked, How many of you doesn't use a car?

I always tell my students, If you have a deceptive cadence, be sure to raise your eyebrows. Then everybody will know.

In the language of my students, Deep thought matters when you're contemplating what to do about things that matter.

Disagreeing with Chai Ling's stand, another former student leader Wang Dan issued a public statement via Facebook and stirred up a lot of debate.

My students produced these info graphics as a result of a unit that we decided to do at the end of the year responding to the oil spill.

For instance, this is another student of mine, Susan Jackson from Australia, who did work with some of the leading athletes in the world.

And one of my former doctoral students, Dr. Mary Schweitzer, actually had the background to do this sort of thing.

So the problem I had is that the worldview that my students had corresponds to reality in the world the year their teachers were born.

Unbelievable! Through her, my kids, the most disenfranchised and marginalized, were able to roll out 100 gardens to New York City public schools.

As I was telling Rachel from Google Earth, that I had challenged my students in America I said, You don't know anything about Africa, you're all idiots.

One such victim, a former student, called me the other day and asked, What am I supposed to do now, get a real job?

So they did that, and over the last two years, over 600 hours of instruction has happened over Skype, using what my students call the granny cloud.

A little background when my grade five was learning about child rights, they were made to roll incense sticks, agarbattis, for eight hours to experience what it means to be a child laborer.

Recently, one of my graduate students, Tom said, Kim, I've decided to wear a bike helmet on my way to class.

And when you can do stuff like this These are my kids putting in this technology, and when you can build a roof that looks like that on a house that looks like that with sedum that looks like this, this is the new green graffiti.

My former student Allan Weiss and I have been campaigning since 1990 for better risk management institutions for real estate.

And in fact, one particular instance where I think that actually happens where you can look at it was the Dubrovka Theatre siege in Moscow in 2002, which probably a lot of you, unlike most of my students at ADFA, are actually old enough to remember.

I travel a lot while I'm teaching, and I don't always get to watch all of my students reach their step three, but I was very lucky with Charlotte, that I got to watch her journey unfold the way it did.

In the UK, a survey has found that half of those shown the Fairtrade symbol recognized it and understood that it refers to products that give a better deal for Third World farmers. There is no comparable US research, but related data, and discussions with my own students, suggests that the figure would be much lower.

Elijah Zarwan, from Egypt, discusses a wire story about a 17 year old American exchange student who was allegedly 'starved' after being paired with a Christian Coptic family, which fasts for 200 days a year.

So, in fact, my graduate students are, at this very moment, today, at the telescope, in Hawaii, making observations to get us hopefully to the next stage, where we can address this question of why are there so many young stars, and so few old stars.

So one of my graduate students, John Scannella, looked through our whole collection and he actually discovered that the hole starting to form in Triceratops and, of course it's open, in Torosaurus so he found the transitional ones between Triceratops and Torosaurus, which was pretty cool.

These sympathetic smiles spread all throughout the room now, and I realize that all of my other students are in the same boat, that maybe they took notes or they memorized definitions from the textbook, but not one of them really understood the main ideas.

I use spoken word to help my students rediscover wonder, to fight their instincts to be cool and unfazed and, instead, actively pursue being engaged with what goes on around them, so that they can reinterpret and create something from it.

You've given the lectures, so now what we do ... and this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow ... what I do is I assign the lectures for homework, and what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom.