Blog Post #7

What Can We Learn About Teaching and Learning From Randy Pausch?

The Blog assignment this week was to watch the video Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. The Lecture was given by Randy Pausch, Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Randy started the lecture by telling the audience that he has terminal cancer and according to the doctors, only "3 to 6 months of good life left". The lecture was not at all what you would think coming from someone with his prognosis. He was inspiring, funny, upbeat, and genuinely happy. He took the audience through his childhood dreams. He had a list of dreams or goals that he wanted to achieve in life and he spoke to each item on the list. He later talked about his career and the obstacles that he overcame to achieve his dream. When he was turned down for a job, he said "Brick walls are not there to keep us out but to prove how bad we want something". "The brick walls are there to stop people who do not want it bad enough". Randy had tenacity, whenever he had a closed door, he would treat it as an opportunity.

Randy used an expression throughout his lecture called "head fake". Head fake is where you think you are learning one thing, but you are actually learning something totally different during the process. One example that he used was football. He loved football and realized that while playing his favorite sport, he was learning more than just how to throw the ball or read a play. He was being taught life lessons like teamwork, sportsmanship, perseverance.

He took the "head fake" one step further and helped develop a computer program called ALICE which is where a student thought they were making movies and playing computer games, but were actually learning computer programming. He wanted children to have fun while they were learning something hard.

Throughout the lecture he was giving life lessons such as: show gratitude, be earnest, tell the truth,apologize when you screw up, focus on others not yourself, work hard, find the best in everybody, be prepared, enjoy life, have fun, don't complain, get a feedback loop and listen to it, and never give up.

The lecture was not about how to achieve your dreams as he led the audience to believe, but how to lead your life. The lecture was not for the audience but for his 3 children that in is death, he would leave behind.

This was a wonderful lecture that made such an impression on me. I am happy that our class had this assignment as I feel we are keeping the wisdom of Randy Pausch alive.