Google Images
Randy Pausch's Last Lecture video was truly inspiring. He broke down the hour long lecture into three parts: his childhood dreams, how to enable the dreams of others, and useful advice. I found the last section quite useful. The useful advice is something I can take and apply it to my future teaching. In this blog post I will be stating some of the useful advice he gave and try to apply it to my future class.
The first piece of advice that I thought was useful was that he learned to never set a specific bar for his students to reach. He learned that if he did not set the bar then the students would go above and beyond the limitations. I think that this is good advice because you do not want your students just to reach the bar that you set and that be it, you want your students to go above and beyond and to succeed in so much more than what you have just set for them to reach.
The second piece of advice that Pausch's lecture gave was, "brick walls are there for a reason, they let us prove how badly we want something." This statement is very true, because if we run into a brick wall and we want it bad enough then we will stop at nothing to go over that brick wall. This is good advice to one day use in the classroom because it teaches students to never give up and to try until they have succeeded.
This next statement is something that everyone needs to hear, "don't complain, just work harder." This is useful not only to students but also to teachers. People tend to complain about the easiest things, myself included, when things could be so much more difficult. I could use this advice in my classroom by telling my students this when things get tough and they start to complain.
Some other useful statements he gave were: "Don't bail, the best gold is at the bottom of barrels of crap", "Get a feedback loop, and listen to it", "Show gratitude", and "Always be prepared". This lecture was very inspiring. I can use a lot of these lessons in the classroom in the future.
