Blog Post #6

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

          This lecture was originally about achieving your childhood dreams but it was also about helping others achieve theirs. He expresses that as you get older, you may find that “enabling the dreams of others’ is even more fun and that we must not lose sight of the fact that the inspiration and the permission to dream is huge. Through all that he has learned in his life, helped bring him to be able to say, “We can’t change it, and we just have to decide how we’re going to respond to that,” after learning he only had months to live with liver cancer.
          One great teaching tool that all teachers need to perfect is what he calls “head fakes”. This is when you have your students doing one thing but they are really learning another. For example, in sports you may be learning specific skills but you are really learning the importance of fundamentals, teamwork, leadership, sportsmanship and perseverance. Lifelong skills that can be applied to any job or endeavor instead of just the skill of the sport.
          When creating the course called Building Virtual Worlds he allowed his students to create anything they wanted except for porn or violence. Giving them the freedom to create their own worlds produced some of the best work he had seen and he had no idea what to tell them to do next. A very wise mentor told him to tell them that the work was very good but he knew they could do better. Confirming the fact that the challenge to always do better or perfect what is already done inspires students to try harder and think harder.
          Not only did he allow his students to work in teams and create these virtual worlds, he also allowed them to share their knowledge and creativity with others which gave them the chance to know what it feels like to make other people happy and get excited about learning. That is a tremendous gift.
          Another big success of his teaching was teaching people about feedback. About every two weeks he allowed all teammates to rank how easy it was to work with another person. He shared the results on a bar chart telling them where they stacked up against their peers. It caused his students to think about how they were treating others and if they were contributing enough to the team. He states that the best gift an educator can give is to get somebody to become self-reflective.
          Some other great advice he shares is to never lose the childlike wonder, it is too important. It’s what drives us. He also encourages to never give up.  Brick walls allow you to show your dedication. They are what separate us from the people that really don’t want to achieve their dreams. Show gratitude to others. Don’t complain. Just work harder. Be good at something, it makes you valuable. Find the best in everybody and always be prepared.
          This was wonderful advice coming from a very successful person. It was very evident that he had loved the life he had lived. As he said at the end, this lecture wasn’t about how to achieve your dreams; it was really about how to lead your life. It was very fitting that the greatest head fake was that the talk was not for us, but for his kids.