In Randy Pausch's video Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams he talks about the dreams he had as a child and how he achieved them. He also explained how he was able to enable the dreams of others. Being a teacher, helping others achieve their goals is what matters. It is important to find out their interest and ignite the fire in them and open the door of opportunity. Randy Pausch said that brick walls are not to keep you from achieving your goals, instead, they are to prove how bad you want it. When the brick walls are built up in front of your students help them find ways to break them down and press through. Let them communicate their ideas and listen to what they have to say, even if you don't know what the outcome will be. Randy Pausch states that the best way to teach something is to have your students think they are learning something else. I think that is where project based learning comes in. When you have a project in front of your students, they don't see the learning involved they see the fun. When you create a bar of excellence your students will work to reach that goal. What about exceeding beyond that bar? Randy Pausch suggest not to set a bar just allow your students to keep going. Pausch's Building Virtual Worlds class used the project based learning method and was very successful. He thought to use a video game type technology to teach useful things. Which I think is brilliant because much of our youth today are engulfed in video games. We can use those tools to power the student's minds and have fun at the same time. Pausch stated that if someone has disappointed you, let you down or hurt you don't give up on them just yet. Eventually the good side of them will emerge. I think we can apply this to our future students as well. Some students will drag by doing the bare minimum but eventually you will strike their interest and they will excel. Don't be so quick to give up on this type of student, continue to push through and eventually this student will have something to offer.
What can we learn from Randy Pausch about learning?
Randy Pausch talks about how we should learn indirectly though real life experiences. Although his video was about achieving his childhood goals we are able to learn major points that we could apply to ourselves as teachers. One useful tip he mentioned was to cherish feedback. Do not get offended when it comes to peer editing because it will only help you improve. Thus, you can apply these tips to your future assignments. We should also learn to be a team player. Most jobs and some school projects require teamwork. Strive to be the person everyone wants to work with. In Pausch's class, after projects are completed the members do an evaluation on their group members. If you receive a bad review, work on things to improve your team working skills and apply it to the next collaborative project. My favorite part of the video is when he brought out a cake for his wife's birthday. He explained that we should focus on others rather than ourselves. We should also help others and share the information we know with them. It will be very rewarding to enable the dreams of my future students and help them succeed.
Very good post! I liked that you mentioned the students that just do enough to get by in school. We need to remember as future educators to not give up on these kids and if anything push them harder to do the work we know they are capable of doing. We need to provide meaningful and interesting ways to teach our students and help them get all they can out of our class.
ReplyDeleteGreat job, Courtney!
ReplyDelete