Post #7

Post Response to Randy Paush

In the video Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, Randy tells the audience what all he is going to talk about in his lecture. His main three points were his childhood dreams, enabling the dreams of others, and lessons learned: How you can achieve your dreams or enable the dreams of others. Randy emphasizes on these points using stories that have happened to him throughout his life and what he has learned from them. In the video he is dying from tumors in his liver, and wants to pass his teachings on to the next generations guiding them and advising them in different aspects of life and school.

Childhood Dreams

Randy goes through his childhood dreams and tells how he slowly but surely succeeded in all of them. He went through some rough times and sometimes he did not think that he was going to be able to succeed but he did not give up. He hit a lot of what he called "brick walls", which are problems that he had to go through to get what he wanted. Randy says that when you get to a brick wall it is up to you if you are going to give up. I quote "The brick walls in life are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things. They are there to stop the people who do not want it badly enough." Randy also tells us about a time that he was playing on a football team and the head coach had been riding on him all day about everything he was doing wrong. After practice an assistant coach came to talk to him and told him that "When you're screwing up and nobody is saying anything, that means they gave up." Randy goes on to teach "you're critics are the ones telling you they still love you. He tells us about something called a "head fake". It is an underlying message in what the instructor is trying to say. He uses parents putting their children into sports. Most parents do not put their children in sports to learn the sport but to learn sportsmanship and teamwork.

Enabling the Childhood Dreams of Others

When you are trying to help someone achieve their childhood dreams don't give up on them early on, if you wait long enough people will impress you. When teachers are trying to get their students to do better Randy's mentor, Andy Van Dam, told Randy "You obviously do not know where the bar should be and you would be doing your students a disservice if you put it anywhere." This tells us future teachers that we can tell our students they did a good job, but also tell them that we know they can do better. By telling them this they will see that your bar for them is obviously not where they thought it was. This will motivate them to always strive to do better and better, and they will always want to impress you. Teachers always need to push their students as far as they possibly can. Randy says "The best gift an educator can give is to get someone to be self-reflective." Teachers should make students ask themselves if they think that is the best they can do, make them strive to be the best. Randy also recommends that the teacher use a "head fake". The best way to teach someone something is to make them think they are learning something else. An example of that in the classroom is teaching the children a hard lesson, but making it fun to where they do not even realize that they are learning.

What Helps Someone Achieve Their Dreams?

Randy tells us that the roles of our parents, mentors, and students help us achieve our dreams. Parents are there to support us in all of our decisions and aspirations throughout life. He tells us that if our child wants to paint their room to let them, it will be a way for them to express themselves and do what they want to do to their room. Mentors help us make decisions that we would have never thought about making. Students teach us different ways we can present things to our future students to make them more appealing. He tells us to have fun in what we do. We all need to decide if we are a Tigger or an Eeyore in life. Are we going to have fun with everything or are we just going to sit around and mope all the time? Never lose your childlike wonder, its too important, its what drives us in our dreams and aspirations. Randy tells us that when you do the right things, good things have a way of working out.