Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture"

Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He was asked to do be a part of a series of lectures called the Last Lectures. They were not meant to be a lecture series for those at the end of life, but unfortunately that is what became the case with Mr. Pausch. Just a short time before he was to do his Last Lecture, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer with no more than 6 months to live.

A website dedicated to Randy's Last Lecture can be found by clicking here.
You can view a video of Randy's Last Lecture on YouTube by clicking here.

I encourage anyone reading this post to watch the video. It is over an hour long it is very well worth it. Hopefully you will be positively effected by as I was. His lecture was titled "Achieving your Childhood Dreams." One of the things that he spoke of that I really loved was such a simple concept. He used a metaphor using well known Disney characters. He said that you can choose to live your life as a Tigger or an Eeyore. How simple is that, but it is true! You can not change the cards that you are dealt in life, but you CAN choose how you respond or react to what you are given. Randy Pausch certainly did that, and I think that's something that everyone can strive to do also.

Another thing that I liked thinking of my future as a teacher. He ran into a problem with his students when they completely exceeded his expectations on the very 1st assignment of the class. He said that what the students produced for the 1st assignment he would have accepted as a final assignment, something that they would have worked all semester on and they would have gotten an A. He didn't know what to do. Seeking advice, he was told - "you obviously don't know where the bar should be and you are only going to do them a disservice by putting it anywhere." I love that for a teaching strategy. That's exactly what I want to be able to do for my future students. I want to allow them to reach far beyond what they think they can do.

I also did a podcast with Martha Miles and Blake Middleton in my EDM 310 class about Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. You can find that podcast by going to this website. Click here.