Katherine Zoghby's EDM310 Class Blog: Blog Post #7 "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"

Randy Pausch 1960-2008

This week for our blog assignment we viewed Randy Pausch's Last Lecture that was posted on Utube. He was a professor at Carnegie Mellon who passed away from cancer in 2008. This last lecture before he died was called "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams". I really enjoyed his last lecture and I believe that all teachers would benefit from viewing it. However, it was over an hour in length and I can't possibly mention everything that he covered. I will try to hit upon a few key points and some of my favorites.

Randy's lecture was broken up into basically three topics:

He talked first about his childhood dreams. Some of his childhood dreams were to experience zero gravity, to play in the NFL, become Captain Kirk, be an author in World Book Encyclopedia, win lots of big stuffed animals at the fair, and work as an imagineer at Disney World. He surprisingly managed to do all of these things except play in the NFL and become Captain Kirk. However, he did play high school football and he did get to meet and work with William Shatner. He mentioned that his family made him into the man that he is today and everything he has achieved was accomplished by learning the fundamentals and working hard. There will always be brick walls that come up and get in the way, but these walls can prove to us how badly we really want something. So many things....we can learn indirectly. In fact, he summed it up best when he said "Experience is what you get, when you didn't get what you wanted".

Randy then talked about enabling others to achieve their childhood dreams. We all need help in achieving our goals and we can learn so much from others, such as teachers, professors, parents, colleagues, friends and mentors. We can even learn from students! Randy gave so freely of his time as a professor and he really had fun and motivated his students. Throughout his lecture, you could see that his style of teaching was more project based, with intense learning, fun experiences, and even field trips! They did such fun projects such as working for Disney, creating virtual worlds, starting the Dream Fulfillment Factory curriculum, and developing Alice (a self taught computer programming course). All of his students in his masters program were guaranteed employment upon graduation by several big companies from all over the world. Randy and his students were learning and developing new technologies as they went and they were way ahead of their time. So many of the programs he started are still going on today, but they are even better and more advanced!

Lastly, he talked about all the lessons that he had learned along the way. He reminded us to have fun learning and never lose our wonder. We should be there to help others along the way and we should remain loyal. Most importantly, we should work hard and never give up. I certainly agree with his teaching philosophy...we need to focus on our students and teach them to be good at something because it makes them more valuable. We always need to find the best in our students and prepare them for the world by being earnest, telling them the truth, giving feedback, and listening. We should never bail out on our students and we should never be afraid to apologize. I think he summed it up best when he mentioned that the most important thing we can do for our students is to teach them to be Tiggers and not Eeyores. Another words, if we are to be life long learners, then we shouldn't be complaining along the way! We should just do better!

After listening to this lecture, I did come away with an overall philosophy about teaching in the 21st century. I plan to provide a learning environment that is interesting and motivating to my students. I plan to support my students in any way that I can. I will always try to remember the huge impact I can have on their dreams and I will try to give them the tools they need....so they will never give up!