Blog Post 7

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

After watching Dr. Pauch's Last Lecture, I had so many thoughts I wasn't sure where to begin. My first feeling was of great respect for Dr. Pauch. Even though he is dieing of cancer, he is standing up with his head high. You don't feel a since of gloom and doom, and he is definitely not suffering from poor pitiful me syndrome. It's sad but I know people who let something as simple as catching too many red lights on the way to work ruin their entire day. Unknowingly, his introduction has a life lesson that we all need, he makes you think about your own outlook on life.

He leads into his childhood dreams, and for the most part how he made them come true. It amazed me how he went through each one of his dreams and made them a reality. He made it seem so simple, "set your goal and reach it". So many times we feel like our childhood dreams are unreachable, and we should settle for what is reasonable. I think the fear of failure or not knowing what would happen if we didn't succeed makes the majority of people take the safest route. There is also the group of people that try to reach their dreams but hit what Dr. Pausch calls a "brick wall". He tells us that brick walls are there for a reason, they show us how bad we want things. I think that sometimes fear also plays a part in this. If we give it our all and smack into a brick wall, a lot of time even though we want it we are just scared to try again or we start to believe that it's just not feasible.

One of the childhood goals he mentions was his dream of being in the NFL. He played on a football team and was the smallest player on the team. He had an exceptional coach, I think he called him "old school". He knew the importance of learning the fundamentals before learning the fancy stuff. That can be applied to everything in life. It's kind of the crawl before you walk way of learning. So many times we want to skip to the fancy fun stuff but when doing this we forget the basics. Or even worse we don't know why we do the fancy stuff. This can be applied to the questions we have been answering about bringing technology into the classroom. Technology would be the fancy stuff. If a student can't explain in their own words why they are using the technology, or they can't tell you how to get the answer without it then there is a fundamental issue. I also like what the assistant coach told him after he had been chewed out repeatedly during practice, he tells him that it's good because when you're messing up and nobody says anything to you, it means that they have given up on you. That's a worse position to be in. Pausch lets us know that even though he didn't actually get into the NFL, he learned the most from the pursuit of this dream. It is interesting that throughout his life he was most comfortable on the football field and even tossed a football around when he was thinking about something.

Pausch made it his life goal to enable the dreams of others. I would venture to say he reached that goal and then some, he has touched the lives of many. He started a new department at Carnegie Mellon University. In this department they paired an artist and an engineer and through virtual reality they helped students from all different majors believe in and work towards their goals/dreams. He mentions a class of students in his program that did wonderful work, they met all his expectations. He wasn't sure the best way to approach this, so he asked his mentor. He told him to tell them that their work was good, but he knew they could do better...... and they did! This way of thinking makes so much sense, I will use this with not only my classroom but also with my children. If we start thinking we have met the expectations and we are finished, then we just might be missing out on some awesome accomplishments. We should push forward, stay positive but know you can always do better.

His closure is about his mentors and parents. He tells how they influenced his life and encouraged him to be the person he had become. His parents supported him through and through. I am making it my goal to keep the child-like wonder alive in myself, and I will pass it on to my children and hopefully to my students!