Blog Post #8

What can we learn about teaching and learning?
The video was of Randy Pausch's last lecture. It is called his last lecture because Randy is battling cancer. He has a great outlook on life and you can see this show throughout the video. He proves that you should not feel sorry for him by doing physical activity in front of everyone, and just wants to tell his story. Throughout the video he gives us a list of his childhood dreams. Some of which were more realistic than others, but they were his dreams. Each of these dreams he made strong attempts to accomplish throughout his life, and even did accomplish many of them. He talks about how they were not all easily attainable dreams, and he hit many brick walls in the process of accomplishing them. He says that "brick walls are there to show how bad we want something." I think this was an important thing to mention because in learning we are going to face brick walls where we think we cannot succeed, but for those of us who want it bad enough we will find a way to succeed. He says that Jon Shoddy once said to him that "if you wait long enough then people will impress you". What is important about this as it applies to learning I think is that everyone has something to offer, and not everyone is always bad. If we wait for someone to impress you than we can learn something from them, and even learn patience for ourselves. We as teachers need to be constantly learning as well as students, and I think that keeping patience in mind it will be to our advantage of learning from those around us. In teaching Randy gave an example of one of his classes. He set the class up to have 50 students, paired them into groups of 4, and gave them a project to work on for 2 weeks to present. The students worked and completed the project, and when they were finished Randy was blown away by the work they had done. Something I found to be very intelligent and a great teaching style is that he did not tell the students right away how great they had done on the project, but he told them they could do better. Telling these students that they could do better kept pushing them, and they were able to create even better work. This is an important teaching skill to really push students to their greatest potential. Randy said that someothing that has helped him teach students new software is by making them think that they are learning something else. He does this by making the projects entertaining for the students, but also using the software so the students are actually being taught new technology without realizing how hard the technology is. Randy says that everyone is either a "Tigger" or an "Eeyore", and I think this can apply to being a teacher and a learner. To be a teacher and a learner you want to be more of a "Tigger" because the important part is to keep having fun. To be a healthy teacher and learner you have to show dedication, cherish feedback, show gratitude, work hard, be good at something, find the best in everyone, be prepared, and most importantly HAVE FUN.

Be a Tigger