Blog Post #8 - What Can We Learn About Teaching and Learning From Randy Pausch?

Wow. Where do I even begin? I was semi-prepared for what I would hear in Randy Pausch's Last Lecture because I had heard people talk about it before, but I was not prepared for the emotion that I experienced at the end. What an incredible man. Moving on to what I learned from this video, first and foremost I was reminded to live each day with purpose. Dr. Pausch knew at the time of this lecture that his days were literally numbered, but listening to him speak, you would hardly know it. It seems that he is merely retiring and moving on to the next phase of his life. His passion was made clear in the final topic of his outline:

Lessons learned: How YOU can achieve your dreams or enable the dreams of others 

This final lecture was all about how he realized his childhood dreams and helped his students to reach their goals. It should also be pointed out that he instilled in them the drive to enable the dreams of still more people. Imagine the  possibilities if we all took his advice.

Dr. Pausch used project-based learning to help his students reach a potential that they [and he] didn't even know they had. He was constantly networking, asking questions about what he could do better, and LEARNING. My favorite lesson in this lecture is that, "Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things." As I sat listening to him repeating this theme, I couldn't help but think of all of the brick walls that I have run into in my life. I've hit brick walls, and I've let them stop me. I never thought of the walls as a sort of filter to weed out those people who didn't want it badly enough. Am I that person? More importantly, do I want to continue to be that person? Finally, how can I help my students to realize those walls in their lives and encourage them to break them down?