Blog Post #10

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

Randy Pausch was an amazing man and very talented. The video that we were assigned to watch was Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams at Carnegie Mellon University. In the beginning of the video Randy tells the audience that he had ten tumors in his liver and that he had about six months of good health left. This man did more things in his 47 years on Earth than most people would ever dream of doing. There are three main points that he touched on: First, Childhood Dreams. Second, Enabling the dreams of others. Third, Lessons Learned: How can you achieve your dreams or enable the dreams of others. Randy talked about his many childhood dreams that he had. Most dreams that he had did in fact come true. He did get to fly at zero gravity and be a Disney Imagineer and many others. Some things he dreamed he didn't get to do, like become an NFL football player, but that never stopped him. Unfortunately in July of 2008 Dr. Pausch passed away from Pancreatic cancer, but the many things like the Alice project will never be forgotten.

What can I learn about learning from Randy Pausch? I learned that when I'm a teacher I can't give up. Even when you hit a brick wall like Randy says,"Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how bad we want things". Always help others reach their goal as much as you want to reach yours. He also thought that learning should be fun and I can't agree more with him. Learning should stay fun and interesting, this keeps the kids wanting to learn and excited about doing and learning new things. The one thing that stood out to me that he said was "There is nothing like watching kids have fun learning something hard." I can't wait until I become a teacher and get to help kids have fun while learning something hard.

What can we learn about teaching from Dr. Pausch? One of Dr. Pausch's mentors told him to "Never set a bar with the students when you don't know where to put it, because you will only do a disservice to them by making one." That statement alone make me think that teachers can limit their kids work if they set the bar to low. Always tell students that their work was good, but you know they can do better. Tell the students this even when their work was more than what you expected them to come up with. By telling students that they can do better than what they had turned in will make them want to try and do better on the next project or assignment given.