Saturday, October 6, 2012

Blog Assignment 6

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: Acheiving Your Childhood Dreams

Randy Pausch lecturing the Last Lecture

What a wonderful and humorous lecture to hear to get the dose on the potential in life. Mr. Pausch's lecture focused on achieving your childhood dreams and enabling others to fulfill their childhood dreams. However, the main idea behind his lecture was how to lead your life. Through his experiences and ventures, he touched the lessons he learned in his life as well as those that he taught to others. As a future educator, I found his lecture to be very resourceful.

Something that Dr. Pausch said that he had learned earlier in his life is that critics are the ones that will show you that they still care. Others who stop telling you where you are messing up in life are the ones that have given up. Dr. Pausch urged that students become more reflective on criticism. He says that arrogance limits what you are can accomplish; therefore, instead of neglecting your mistakes, accept them and learn from them. This way, you are able to clean up and polish your skills. Peer-criticism is one technique I can use in my teaching. It is a great way for students to learn underlying skills, such as listening to feedback, and wisdom that will always be used latter on in their lives.

In many of the courses he taught, such as Building Virtual Worlds, he used the format of group-work. He wanted to impart that bonding between group members and learning how to work together is very important. It teaches how to work with different people (the class had people from all departments). I believe that group work allows you to learn to make all kinds of adjustments. I can't think of a better way to teach the hidden agenda of cooperation, leadership, membership, effective listening, and positivity. As an educator, it is crucial that students learn such skills, even though they are not found in the curriculum.

Another technique that I found essential was to keep "raising the bar". In the first year he taught Building Virtual Worlds, Dr. Pausch was simply amazed with the excellent first projects that his students had created. They exceeded his expectations. His mentor advised him to tell his class that the projects were good but could have been better. In this way, students worked harder, and he was able to get even more out of the students. I think a little challenge can get students to achieve more than they think they can achieve.

What I found to be the most important technique conveyed by Dr. Pausch was to find a fun way to teach something useful, something he called "edutainment" . He said that "the best way to teach something is to have them think that they are learning something else". For example, in his lifetime, Dr. Pausch used the approach of letting his students create movies and games to learn computer programming. As an educator, it is important that kids have fun while learning something hard. I think it is a great way to get attention and focus as well as dedication.

1 comment:

  1. I am glad you found the video useful. It is a powerful statement.

    Thorough, thoughtful, well done! Thanks.

    ReplyDelete