Week 8`

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
I watched this entire video, not because I wanted to, but because it simply grabbed my attention and was truly touching and informative. Randy Pausch was was dying of cancer, and was so upbeat. This whole film was interesting, hilarious, exciting, and very informative. It was no wonder his legacy is that his students had fun learning very difficult material. I have never been interested in that type of information, but listening to this speech made me wish I had him as a teacher. Throughout this speech Pausch gave great advice, and my favorite point was that "Brick walls are there for a reason, and that reason is to keep the people out who don't want it bad enough."
Pausch's first part of his speech was about his childhood dreams. He actually accomplished many of his childhood dreams, and learned many valuable lessons from them. In football he learned about the "head fake" that is that your teaching children about one thing, but in doing so teach them way more about life in general. In fact this whole speech had two "head fakes" because the whole thing was about how you should live your life, not achieving your childhood dreams. And also he said the second "head fake" was the whole talk was for his children. I thought this was really cool, because his speech made me think about how I should be living my life and what kind of legacy I will leave.
Also Pausch got to work for Disney and got to work with many important people in that line of work. He also had good advice from many people along the way and he made point that you should listen to the advice people give you, because it makes you examine yourself. He had a professor that encouraged him to become a professor even though he didn't want to, and the professor told him that he would be a great salesman, but why not be a salesman for something worthwhile, like education. That point really drove home the point on how enthusiastic teachers should be about education, because it is really important.
In the classroom Pausch was a innovator. He broke the mold and taught in ways that had never been done before. In his undergraduate classes his students had such an enthusiasm for the class that even their parents came to watch the presentations at the end of the semester. In his graduate level classes he didn't believe in using books, and was a projects course. This way it got his students hand dirty in the field, and also they had a lot of fun doing it. Also he wanted to make his a global thing offered to millions of students, and in the last couple of years this has became a reality, even though Pausch didn't get to see it.
In closing the main points that I got from this lecture was that always have fun. You can have fun and learn difficult material. And even though you get dealt a bad hand, like he did with cancer, you can still enjoy life. He enjoyed his life and that came through in his last lecture. By being so enthusiastic about his profession and having fun many students of his are now teaching in the same way he did.

"Don't Bail; the best gold is at the bottom of the barrels of crap"-- Randy Pausch