Blog Post 8

This week’s assignment was to watch Randys Pausch Last Lecture.  Randy was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He gave his last lecture September 18, 2007. The reason it was his last lecture because he had 3-6 months to live due to 10 tumors on his liver. Randy seemed like a wonderful person who was very enthused about everything in life.

When I first looked at the video, I noticed it was over an hour long, I automatically cringed. Five minutes when by and I noticed I wanted to watch the entire video with no complaints. Randy Pausch has a awesome story. While watching his video not only did I take notes for this post but also for my teachings. One thing that he stated that I just love is, “brick walls are for reasons: they let us prove how badly we want things.” This quote stuck out to me because; while teaching students not everything will be easy, but if you keep trying you WILL succeed. This quote separates many people, the ones who want it and the ones that will just settle. When teaching I never want my students to settle, I want them to succeed. Jon Snoddy also was quoted by saying, “when you stick with someone long enough they will impress you.” This quote is very true and being a teacher as well as a mentor I believe I should practice this quote. Many teachers give up on students after they have misbehaved so many times. As a teacher, I will try and stick with my students as best as I can to help succeed in life the best I can. Randy also mentions think about how you say things. As a teacher, students will feed off of the teachers actions, if the teacher is in a bad mood; the students know it will be a bad day for them. That is not how things should be. Randy was very intrigued about Project Based Learning. The fact that jobs put it in writing that they would hire his students is amazing; Carnegie was the only university to have the privilege. He states, “One way to teach is by thinking they are learning something but really learning something else.” What I took from this is, the students think they are creating a cool project but really they are learning how to do something that we are working on in the classroom. This video was a well-used hour of my time.