Blog Post #7

Before I begin to describe what we can learn about learning and teaching from Randy Pausch, I just want to say how inspiring his story is. This lecture was about much more than learning and teaching. It was about pursuing your dreams, and not giving up when things get hard. It was about taking responsibility for yourself and your education. He did not wait around for things to happen, he made them happen.

In the video, The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch taught me plenty of things about learning. Even after he left school he spent his entire life learning new things. Something that he learned was that hitting a "brick wall" was not always the end. He said that what he learned is that brick walls let us prove how badly we want things. This stuck with me more than anything else because all of us at one point or another have hit one of these metaphorical brick walls. When this happens it is so easy to give up. What Randy Pausch taught us is that we have to learn that that brick wall is meant to stop people who do not truly want it. If you are a person who truly wants something and you hit a brick wall on your way to it, do not give up! Keep working harder until you find a way over that brick wall.

What he also taught about learning is that we all should be lifelong learners. After he finished school he continued to work with new people: students, professors, and even the "Imagineers" working at Disney; and he learned something new from each one. This taught us that we can learn something new from anyone.
Randy Pausch taught us about teaching in his video in many ways. The first way that I noticed when he was describing his childhood dream of playing in the NFL. He said that knowing how to play football was great, but the skills you earn from playing football are even more important. The skills include: trust, teamwork, loyalty, friendship, and even more. This he described as Head Faking. Head Faking is when you make someone think they are learning one thing when really they are learning something else. This is especially applicable to the classroom setting. Students are often so focused on the academic components of school that they do not gain some of the important basic skills everyone needs to function in today's world. These skills would be things like: how to work in a group, how to ask for help when you need it, and how to make suggestions and corrections on other's work. This Head Fake style of teaching should be used by every teacher.

Another important component of teaching I learned is that a teacher has to learn where to place the bar for their students. When discussing the class he taught on virtual reality, he said that he gave his students two weeks for their first assignment. When the time came to present, he said that he was blown away by his students work. He consulted another professor asking what he should do. The other professor told him that he should go in and say that he knows that they can do better. This would raise the bar for his students. He did just that, and with every project the students excelled higher and higher until the presentation of the student's virtual worlds became such an important event that hundreds of people would attend just to see the progress of his class. This shows me that as teachers we should always raise the bar higher for our students. Like he said, if we do not we are doing our students an injustice.