Blog Assignment #8

            Listening to Randy Pausch speak during his last lecture has had a profound experience and impact on the way that I view the education process. In the first few minutes of the video, after he explains his terminal illness, he told a story about his old football coach that opened my eyes. One rough day after his coach had been riding him all day long, telling him what he was doing wrong and just generally giving a young Randy a hard time, one of the assistant coaches informed Randy that the coach was doing him a favor. “When you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they've gave up.”  That taught me a valuable lesson about teaching, that I cannot be scared to point out the faults and sugarcoat things for my students. Covering up their mistakes cannot allow them to learn and grow. As such, I realize that it is my duty as an educator to not only learn from my own mistakes, but to also recognize that my true love for teaching should show through how much effort I put into showing students the correct way and not giving up on them when they make mistakes. Later on Randy talks about how ‘brick walls’ are there to prove how bad we want something.

Persistence is key in success, a phrase easily used to describe everything you need to know about teaching and learning as a whole. Referencing the brick wall statement, basically obstacles are there to deter those who are unwilling to work hard to achieve the goals they have set forth. Randy learned this lesson while pursuing a partnership with Disney’s Imagineering project, a top-secret project that Disney was working on that would provide the perfect platform for his virtual reality experience to come in handy. After running into problems with the Dean for the program, he found a Dean over another department who would actually be responsible for his project, thus allowing the project to flourish.

Sometime beyond his experience at Disney, Randy started teaching a class called Building Virtual Worlds, a class that would challenge the students to VR projects every two weeks with three other students as partners. Upon presentation of the first project, Mr. Pausch was blown away. He had never seen or imagined the creative genius that was lurking within the students’ potential. Upon speaking with his mentor, he was advised to tell his students that they had done ‘pretty good’ but that he believe they could do better. The class went on to raise the bar for their projects every time after that statement. That was such a powerful lesson for me about teaching. You should always push your students to do better and perform better because once you allow them to settle, they will be wasting their potential. I now see why this video became such an internet sensation. The final lecture of Randy Pausch completely changed the way I view becoming an educator and taught me lessons that would save my future students from not achieving as much as they could. On top of that, I learned how to become a better educator, someone who could someday inspire students to become great individuals of enormous success.