Blog Post 7 - Randy Pausch: The Legend

In Randy Pausch's final lecture, Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, he discusses the importance of not letting anything stop you from achieving your dreams and of fighting for your dreams. This brave man battled with pancreatic cancer, but he never let that stop him from being able to touch people's lives with his powerful words and life-changing lectures. The most important thing, in my opinion, that he discussed in this lecture was that even when you hit a brick wall, do not let that stop you. Brick walls are placed into our lives to strengthen our will-power and to test our skills; they are there to help us. An example of a brick wall would be a teacher who has been teaching for ten years and has yet to come across a challenge she cannot not face, until she meets Jimmy. Jimmy is a stubborn student who refuses to do anything that is asked of him, even when the teacher tries giving him rewards for good behavior, he still does not obey. Now, the teacher could very easily give up and call Jimmy "hopeless" or "not worth the headache", but that wouldn't be pushing through a brick wall, would it? Instead, she works with Jimmy outside of school hours to help improve his performance and abilities...pushing through her brick wall.

The "head fake" is something we have all experienced at some point in our lives, probably when we were given an assignment that we deemed pointless. The head fake is a great example of how to teach students about collaborative projects, teamwork, and project-based learning. Let's say a teacher gives an assignment where she tells her students to choose a well-known president and write a three page essay about every fact they can find about the president they choose. If this is a group of tenth grade students, how much could they really learn from 20 or so papers about George Washington? Probably not a lot...unless this was a group assignment where the students had to learn without using any technology as resources. They had to learn from one another and learn together. A "head fake" is when you trick your students into thinking that they are learning one thing, when they are actually learning something entirely different.

The final thing I appreciated hearing from Randy Pausch is that it is so important for us to stop trying to change thing about our futures or our students. We are all learners and we are all constantly learning. We are all dreamers in some way or another, and we should always encourage our students to dream BIG and dream like crazy. We have to always remind our children that no matter they may do in life, right or wrong, they are destined for greatness and they are more awesome than they are aware of! Randy Pausch said that we must remember that we are never in control of the things we may face in life, and that we have to make the best of the situations we are in at any stage in life. I thought this was really impressive coming from a man who was diagnosed with a disease that is, in most cases, fatal. It is so cool to me that he was able to overcome his circumstances enough to influence people in a positive and legendary. Long live the legend.