Blog Post #8

      In the video, Randy Pausch's Last Lecture, his talk consisted of three sections, including achieving you childhood dreams, helping others achieve their childhood dreams, and lessons learned. This is such an inspirational talk by a man who was truly happy in his life even though he was dealing with terminal cancer. There are many things that I learned about teaching and learning from Randy Pausch.
     Randy says to be specific about your dreams. This can be applied to teaching in our classrooms. Teachers need to be specific in the dreams they have for their students in what they want them to learn. He also says that "brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things." Again, as applied to teaching and learning, when things do not go the way we planned the first time in a lesson, how we handle that will show how determined we are as teachers to help our students learn that material.
     I love Randy's statement that "experience is what you get when you didn't get what you expected." Teachers will get lots of "experience" as they continually learn how to teach the students in their class. He mentioned the term "head-fake", which is basically indirect learning. For example, he explains how children learn things like teamwork, perseverance, and sportsmanship from learning to play a sport. Randy says that the best way to teach someone is to have them think they are learning something else. He had a project in which kids learned how to make movies and games, but they were actually learning how to write programs.
     He ends his talk with a list of advice. Be good at something; it makes you valuable. Work hard. Find the best in everyone no matter how long it takes. Be prepared. This is a list that I plan on applying daily in my classroom as I teach my students and learn from them.