Sunday, March 4, 2012

Blog Post #6

Randy Pausch Last Lecture

Randy Pausch's video named Achieving Your Childhood Dreams is very inspirational. It's people like Randy Pausch that makes me want to be the best teacher I can possibly be. There are three "themes" in this video, and they are: Randy Pausch's dreams, helping others enable their dreams, and lessons learned. This video is a wonderful video that proves that Randy Pausch loved being a teacher and helping students learn in a fun way. After watching this video I will strive to be a teacher like Pausch because he seems to love teaching and his students. As an education major these are things that I strive for myself when I become a teacher.

One thing that Pausch mentions in this video is "have something to bring to the table." This is a very true when trying to be a good teacher. As an educator you have to be able to bring something to the table, because if not you will not be the best educator you can be. A teacher that goes the extra mile will gain the respect of the students and will have students that will want to learn.

Another thing we as educators should do is to make learning fun. As a student I definitely agree with Pausch on this statement. Sitting in a classroom where a teacher reads from the power-point or reads straight from the textbook is very boring; but when you have the student learn on their own or have fun games to help them learn they seem to be more into learning. The way technology is today there is no reason not to make learning more fun for your students. If we as teachers are teaching our students something hard; and we incorporate fun ways to learn it, then our students will most likely learn it without complain about how hard it is.

My favorite thing that Randy Pausch talked about in this video was, "Brick walls are there for a reason." Brick walls are there to stop the ones who really do not want something badly from the ones who truly want it. I know I have came to many brick walls, that I could have just stop there and moved on to something new, but I have to make myself keep going because in the end I knew it would be worth it. This is a great thing to teach students because (even if we do not want to admit it) life is hard and throws you many curve balls. Telling your students this will help them in the long run, because they know that even though things are hard they can make it through this. I really loved that he incorporated this into his lecture, it is very inspirational!

I absolutely loved this video! Randy Pausch seemed to be an amazing teacher, and during the video I thought to myself that I wanted to be in his Virtual Education class. I enjoyed how he used real life examples to explain his reasoning for his themes, and to get his point across. I feel that people who feel that their life is terrible, their is nothing they can do about it, and they are down in the dumps should watch this video and see that just because life is not going the way you want it to does not mean that you should crawl up in a ball and cry. Pausch is a great example of someone who hit a brick wall, but kept going for his family and friends. I will say this video made me tear up when he had the audience sing Happy Birthday to his wife, that was so sweet! I loved everything about this video and would definitely recommend this video to anyone!



Blog Post #6

2 comments:

  1. I agree tremendously with you and Dr. Pausch on making the classroom fun. I have thought up ideas of letting my students act out the history and even maybe changing some of it in plays to get them involved. Since, unfortunately, to some history can become quite boring.

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  2. Don't let the brick walls stop you! Good advice for all of us, especially teachers. There are a lot of brick walls you will encounter when you become a teacher.

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