Blog Post #10

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

    Randy Pausch gives a compelling and heart wrenching lecture on childhood dreams. Randy Pausch was an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University who pioneered some of the greatest virtual reality programs and co-founded the Entertainment Technology Center. In this lecture, Randy, gave a list of all of his childhood dreams and how he achieved or did not achieve them. There are some major points from this lecture that we can implement into our classrooms and instill into our students. First, we should always challenge our students to dream. By not encouraging our students to dream, we are limiting our students perception of what the future could hold. Secondly, we should always push our students to do their best and then to do more. By pushing our students to do more we will achieve a greater product and the students will have a real understanding of what they are capable of.

In his lecture Randy talks about facing brick walls and how those occurrences can allow us to prove and overcome things. Brick walls give us a chance to prove how badly we want something. When students are faced with a brick wall they will either overcome the wall because it is something they desire to accomplish or will become something that was not a priority. Brick walls also let our students show their dedication. If they are dedicated, it will be proven by facing this wall. Randy talks about the concept of a head fake. In using the head fake technique we teach our students to master a concept directly in an indirect manner. In his lecture he taught his students to create computer software by making it so that they were creating a product but in turn learning how to make software. I feel it could be extremely beneficial to use this in our classrooms. One of the greatest things we can do as educators is make learning fun for our students. When the learning process is fun the material learned will stay with your students. Randy Pausch gave his last lecture at Carnegie Mellon University on September 18, 2007. Randy Pausch passed away on July 25, 2008 of pancreatic cancer.