Blog Assignment #7

Randy Pausch: The Last Lecture- Achieving Your Childhood Dreams!

Dr Pausch gives an excellent lecture about how to achieve your dreams and how to enable others to achieve theirs.Dr. Pausch taught computer science and worked for Carnegie Mellon Univeristy, where he instructed a class based on virtual reality. He titled his lecture "The Last Lecture" because normally it is the last thing you talk about before you die. He was diagnosed with liver cancer but he had a great attitude and just lived his life. He begins his lecture by giving us a list of all his childhood dreams. They were:

• Being in zero gravity
• playing in the NFL
• winning stuffed animals
• authoring an article in the World Book Encyclopedia
• being Captain Kirk (later changed that to meeting Captain Kirk)
• being a Disney Imagineer

He was able to achieve all these childhood dreams in some way. Though some were harder than others he never gave up on them. He talked about how he was able to and what pushed him to keep going. On the one about playing in the NFL he talks about "head fake" which is a way to learn indirectly. He said that most kids don't even realize they are learning about communication skills and teamwork when their playing football. This is a sneaky way to learn. This was extraordinary because I don't even remember what my childhood dreams  were. He said the only catch is that we tend to push them in the back of our minds and only see them as things that we dreamed about, but could not possibly come true.During the lecture he talked about brick walls and how they are there for reasons.One of them was to let us prove how badly we wanted things. This was so true because I know that when I hit a brick wall I just strive to work harder. This is a great teaching lesson!! This part of the speech led into the main thing: How can I enable the childhood dreams of others? This is what he began to ask himself.

This is where he becomes a professor which helps him really be able to help others pursue their childhood dreams. He is now in the setting to encourage them and teach them things that many others might not have a passion for. He has 50 students randomly picked for his class and they are put in groups and are asked to work together. Each group has to make a virtual world. Afterward, they are asked to rate how easy their partners were to work with. This was a great reflection for them and can be considered one of the best things to teach your students. When Dr. Pausch is talking about the Alice Project he talks about how the students are then going through "head fake" because they are having a lot of fun on the computer that they don't even realize how hard the computer programming is they are mastering. When he uses props this helps students learn in a visual way. Props help students see things as they are and they find the material much more interesting.

He then talks about lessons learned and how the role of parents, mentors, and students are a major part in achieving your dreams. At the end Dr. Pausch brings in some thoughts that he wants to leave others with. A few of them are: Have fun, help others, loyalty is a two-way street, listen to feedback and use it, show gratitude, don't complain-just work harder, and find the best in everyone-maybe their good side will come out eventually. I really like these thoughts and will make sure that I remember them. His lecture was very entertaining and I am glad that I got to listen to it. I learned some very substantial material from him and I hope to apply it with my students so that they can achieve their childhood dreams.