Blog Post 7

Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture", alternately entitled "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" was a lecture given on September 18, 2007. Dr. Pausch passed away a bit less than a year later. In the beginning, Pausch speaks of his childhood goals and exactly how he achieved them, though not exactly the way that he originally expected to. He then moved on to deciding that he wanted to help enable the childhood dreams of other, and thus begins teaching at Carnegie Mellon.

I loved his point of how he would tell his students, "Good work, but you can do better". This encourages them to continue working and never be completely satisfied with oneself. Students, of course, should have self-esteem, but should also keep pushing to higher goals.

Another interesting point was how he and Don had control over the course they taught at Carnegie-Mellon, reporting directly to the provost. This allowed for a lot of things to be done differently, and seems to be every teacher's dream (it reminds me quite a bit of Rafe Esquith, actually.). Students were involved with the community (such as New York Fire Department, for whom they helped build a network simulator to train firefighters), and were even often guarenteed jobs by big companies.

Another interesting teacher point: he put emphasis on peer feedback. This reminds me quite a bit of EDM 310, in that we value each others' opinions to help us learn. Teachers ought remember that students will be critiqued and evaluated all throughout their life, and learning to accept and learn from it is a crucial skill.

He also makes a lot of comments and shares multiple anecodtes about learning from one's students. I think this is a fabulous point, because we must remember that we DO NOT know it all. Students can teach us many things, especially about new technology.