Blog Post 6

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Randy Pausch begins his video by telling the audience that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He had many childhood dreams he wanted to achieve, I'm sure, but he mentioned a few which were; being in zero gravity, playing in the National Football League, authoring an article in the World Book Dictionary, being Captain Kirk, being a guy that won big stuffed animals in the amusement park, and being an imagineer with Disney. We learn throughout the video that he accomplishes almost all of these goals! He met Captain Kirk and became a Virtual Reality Specialist and helped design rides like Aladdin and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Randy Pausch not only wanted to help himself achieve his goals, he wanted to help others achieve their goals as well. He helped many students achieve goals in life. He even helped one student who wanted to be a part of writing the next script for the Star Wars movie. Even though he had to reduce some of his goals to something easier or more fallible to achieve, he never gave up. This is something that we as future educators can learn from him.

We should never give up! There will be times when we have students who find it difficult to learn. We will have days where we don't want to come back and teach the same group of students day after day because they don't want to learn, but it is our job as educators, to make it a fun environment for them. Dr. Pausch did this. He created a class called building virtual worlds for a class of about 50 students. The class completed certain projects and it helped many of them learn how to do things while they were having fun. It is hard to be a teacher and teach students who don't seem to want to learn. I want to strive to be more like Dr. Pausch and actually look for ways of not only achieving my own childhood dreams, but allowing my students to look back and search out their dreams and help them accomplish them.

Randy Pausch never gave up. He knew he only had 3-6 months to live. This inspired me so much. There is a country song that came out when I was in High School entitled "Live Like You Were Dying" by Tim McGraw, it is very similar to what Dr. Pausch did. The song is about the Dad, who is dying, telling his son to live each day as if it were his last and to accomplish his dreams . Dr. Pausch had to live like he was dying because he was. Why should we wait until we are dying though, to actually live? It is okay to let loose and still be a child sometimes. It's okay to still dream big and want big things for your life. We have been taught from a young age that we have to do certain things or be certain things when we get older or we will never be anyone or make any money. I want to be the type of teacher that can encourage my students to live their life as if each day may be their last. I don't want to squash their dreams, I just want to take them and mold them into something better! I want to be an encouragement and Dr. Pausch's video truly showed me that it is important to be this type of educator.