Blog Post #8

What Can We Learn About Teaching and Learning From Randy Pausch?

This video was very enjoyable to watch. There were so many impressionable things that Randy said about life in general but he also gave some great tips about teaching and learning. Randy talked about his own childhood dreams some of which included experiencing zero gravity, playing in the NFL, and being a Disney imagineer. While he achieved some of his dreams and the ones he didn't became learning experiences. Randy became a professor who made major strides in project based learning mainly dealing with virtual reality.


Randy believed that no dream was too big to achieve. You should be brave enough to reach for the stars. Sometimes you will have setbacks but you just have to learn from those set backs and fine a different way. One thing he said that stuck out to me was “The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people."

Randy talks about the various struggles he faced when he began to pioneer his own way in education. Another one of his quotes I want to point out is "If you do anything that is pioneering then you will get arrows in your back and you just have to put up with it." This is a great reminder for educators to take those risk to develop new ways of learning/teaching. There will always be some people who are against your ideas but you need to press on.



Randy believed in having fun with everything you do. He showed that his students learned some very difficult things but they had fun while doing so. This can be a great reminder to educators to have fun while you teacher. You do not have to be some strict, unreasonable teacher but instead help others enjoy learning.

At the time of this lecture Randy had cancer and with dim prognosis. He passed away almost a year after this video was filmed. Even from just watching the video it is easy to see he just radiates fun. He said "One of the best thing you can give somebody is the chance to show them what it feels like to make other people get excited and happy." As an educator shouldn't that be one of our universal goals? Not only to desire to make our students excited about what they are doing , but to show them how to do the same for others. "How can I enable the childhood dreams of others?"

One last thing I enjoyed about Randy's lecture was his ideas of peer review and personal reflection. "One of the best gifts an educator can give is to get somebody to become self-reflective" I couldn't agree more. When people are able to reflect and evaluated their own work they become more productive. There is not always going to be a teacher or professor there to tell the student what they did wrong or what they need to do to improve. So we as educators need to equip our students with that important skill. Also having you peers review you and how easy you are to work with. Teaching is a team effort the involves working with many others; if you are not easy to work with or reliable then you could face some detrimental challenges.

Over all I immensely enjoyed watching this video and it would have been an honor to meet Randy Pausch. This is a video I am going to save and watch it again from time to time to remind myself of all the applicable advice Randy gave. I am also going to share this video with others regardless of what profession they are in. I think everyone can learn something from Randy that can change their outlook on life.