Blog Post 7

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

I immediately wanted to tear up when he introduced himself and what he was going to be speaking about at Carnegie Mellon. Randy Pausch is dying of cancer. He let the audience know that he was not going to talk about cancer, he was not gong to talk about his family, he was not going to talk about religion and what he was going to talk about was his childhood dreams. I was immediately taken in by his introduction and his outlook on his situation. He did not want to be pitied, he wanted to be heard.

My favorite childhood dream he talked about was wanting to play in the NFL. Pausch did not get to actually play in the NFL, but he shared an inspirational story about his coach. Pausch said he was probably one of the smallest people on his team. Him and his team came to their first practice and their coach did not have any footballs. A teammate asked his coach where the footballs were? He simply asked them a couple of questions in response; How many players on the field at once? 22. How many people touch the ball at once? 1. So the coach told his team they were doing to learn what the other 21 players were doing without the football on the field. I think this "strategy" would be helpful in the classroom. Teachers do not need to cater to 1 or 2 students, teachers need to cater to all the students in the classroom. Teachers need to know how each student learns and then teach them.

The second part of the story was that his coach rode him hard during practices. Then the assistant coach took Pausch aside and said that it was good that the coach rode him during practice because that means his coach had not given up on him yet. Randy's coach thought he was better than what he was giving, so he pushed him to do better. Teachers often give up on some of the students in their classroom. Teachers will lower their standards of their students and then the students will start to notice that they are useless in the classroom, because their teachers think they are useless. Teachers need patience in their classroom, so they do not give up on their students.

All through the video Pausch talks about a theory the "head fake". The head fake is when you learn something that you did not think you were going to learn. When he talked about his Virtual Reality course he taught at Carnegie Mellon he again talked about the head fake. He wanted his students to come up with a virtual reality world. The students were not only learning how to use the computer program but also, how to work with a team of students, how to write computer software, and how to have fun.

He closed his video with how we need to have fun with everything we do. He said to never "lose your childhood wonder". When we are children everything is possible. I believe we should keep our child like mindset in teaching, so we as educators can make teaching fun.