Blog Post# 6

Randy Pausch Last Lecture
This was an excellent inspirational and funny speech given by Randy Pausch. In this video Randy Pausch, which is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University teaching virtual technology, gives a speech on his childhood dreams, enabling the dreams of others, and lessons that he has learned throughout his life. At the beginning of the speech, Randy talks about how he is suffering from cancer and how he is not going to let it interfere with him living the rest of life happy. He tells us that he is not worried about the disease and describes that he is in perfect shape by doing push ups. Throughout the video, he gives examples of situations that he has had to deal with and how he thinks should be the way to approach them.
The first part of his speech, he stresses that if you are screwing up and no one is bothering to tell you that you are really in bad shape. This was a great statement; I believe that all students need to know when they are constantly making the same mistakes repeatedly to an extent. I agree that by an instructor not handing them over the solution that the student is forced to think critical and take responsibility in figuring out the problem themselves. He stated that experience is what you get when you did not get what you wanted. This statement is one that I think should be in every classroom because it gives students the idea that just because they failed once does not mean they have to accept failure. With that statement, students will learn that the only way to make them better at anything is to experience mistakes and learn from them. Randy Pausch demonstrates in this video how most of learning is obtained indirectly; however, I think learning indirectly is the best way to get students to learn difficult or boring material because they usually are not aware that they are learning the material.
The second part of his speech was about how to enable your childhood dreams. Randy Pausch stated that as a teacher you should always tell your students that they are doing good but that you know they can do better. He says that it increases the level of work ethic and that you will see that your students are constantly getting better. This is a really good statement because if we strive to always raise that level, I believe that our students will be in a routine to always learn more each day. I learned that project based assignments are helpful because you are working with peers that can give you feedback and gets students to be more inflected. However, students will be learning and having fun at the same time which Randy Paush points out is the best way to teach children.
The last part of this great motivational speech was about the lessons that Randy Pausch has learned throughout his life. He states that the role of parents, mentors, friends, and colleagues can assist you with information and that you should always listen to what they have to tell you. The roles of parents, I think plays the biggest part in the success of children in class because parents that are concerned about their child’s school work will try their best to help them in any way possible, give them guidance, and make them aware of what is expected. Randy Pausch talks about how brick walls let us show our dedication. I agree with this statement because from personal experience sometimes it takes a longer time to get something done correctly which will lead to you working harder on the task. Overall, this video taught me numerous things to better my life and my teaching career. Thank you Randy Pausch!