Blog Post #6

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

I was inspired by the first video that I watched from Randy Pausch and this video was even more inspiring. Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a motivational speaker. He was truly a remarkable man. He was not only head smart he was heart smart. He knew how to live life to the fullest. Even when he was diagnosed with cancer and giving only six months or so to live, he still had a positive outlook on life. He Said, "You can't change the cards that you are dealt, only how you play the hand." He enjoyed everyday that he had and was an inspiration to his family, friends, and colleagues. Randy Pausch's last lecture is not only uplifting and inspiring for teachers, his principals could be applied to anyone in any profession.

The first principal that I would use as a teacher is his theory about brick walls. If I had a struggling student I would try to instill upon them the brick wall theory. By letting the student know that they may face brick walls in their life when trying to accomplish a goal. However those brick walls are only to stop students who not willing to do whatever it took to reach those goals. Another good point that he made was from a childhood experience that he learned from a football coach. His coach said "When you screw up and no one says anything it means that they have given up on you". So as a teacher I would try to make sure that my students knew that I believed in them and would never give up on them.

The head fake theory was another technique that I would use in the classroom. Randy Pausch said, "Most of what we learn, we learn indirectly."He believed in project based learning just like we are doing in EDM 310. His students were learning while they were having fun. Kids can have fun while learning how to make movies and games. The head fake was the fact that they were learning programming skills. This I believe would be very beneficial in the classroom.

The most impotant thing that I got from Randy Pausch was what he said about the gift of education. He said, "The best gift an educator can give is to get somebody to be self reflective." He created a course at Carnegie Mellon called Building Virtual Worlds. The course would involve teams of students that would work on projects for two weeks. Every two weeks the teams would change and work on another project. In addition, every two weeks the students would provide feedback to their peers on how they worked with each other. The feedback that they got from their peers was hard to ignore. This would make them think about how they were communicating with each other. Being able to listen and reflect to criticism from others is a great learning experience. Being able to get your students to be self reflective is a very good teaching method.

At the end of his lecture he asked the audience if they got the two separate head fakes. The first head fake was not about how you achieve your dreams, rather it was about how you lead your life. The second head fake was that his lecture was not for the audience in attendance, rather it was really for his kids. I believe that he was probably a very good father and it's a shame that his life ended so early.