Randy Pausch

One of my blogs I did for last week on the podcast was actually on Randy Pausch, so I knew that he had recently passed away due to his loosing the battle to Pancreatic Cancer. This made me actually excited to see that this week's assignment was on his last lecture, Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. Upon coming out to give his lecture, he made his situation with cancer very open. He spoke about his cancer and told everyone up front that he only had about 2-5 months of good health left, and after doing his series of push ups, he made it very plain that he did not want sympathy from anyone for any reason! He made jokes about buying his new death bed, etc. It was so obvious that this was NOT going to be a boring video! Everybody should watch this! Not only informative, but VERY FUNNY!!!!!

Pausch spoke of several of his childhood dreams which included being in zero gravity, playing in the NFL, authoring an article in the World Book encyclopedia, being Captain Kirk, winning stuffed animals, and being a Disney Imagineer. He wanted to be in zero gravity so badly that when he heard of the competition NASA had for college students to try and win a zero gravity flight, he did everything he had to do, including posing as a journalist, to be able to take that ride! He also took footage from the flight and had a virtual reality set made for children to be able to "experience" zero gravity as well. He talks about his NFL dream, which he did not achieve, and states how he got more from not achieving that goal than he could have if he would have been in NFL! He talks about one of the lessons he learned from his coach was that if you can make mistakes and they go un-noticed, it is because no one is paying attention, or they stopped caring. He did achieve the dream of writing the encyclopedia article though. He wrote it on virtual reality! Then he addressed his Captain Kirk dream! On his power point, he showed how he changed this dream slightly.....MEETING Captain Kirk was his slightly altered dream! He did end up meeting his childhood role model when he came down to study Pausch's virtual reality center. As for the dream of being the stuffed animal winner, the pictures he had are sooooo funny! The animals he has won! No wonder he just bought a new, big house! Some of his "prize bears" were actually brought out to be on stage and he told everyone he would be giving them away at the end of his lecture because THEY COULDN'T FIT IN THE MOVING TRUCK!

His Disney Imagineer dream took a hard hit at first. But Pausch being Pausch found away around this, too. When Pausch was asked to brief the Secretary of Defense on the topic of virtual reality, he was able to have a legit reason to get his foot in the door with Disney. He was able to go to Disney to work for 6 months to work on the Aladdin Project!


After achieving his dreams, his new one was to help enable the achievement of dreams of others! As a professor, he began to try and teach the students how to become, "turned on to their childhood dreams!" He talks about how in his first class, the students turned in assignments that were blowing his mind and he had no idea what to do! He called his mentor and was told to go back into the classroom and say, "guys..this was great, but I know you can do better!" Because of this advice, the students only kept excelling. They just got better and better and better. This intrigued not just students, but parents, friends, other staff, etc. This put Pausch on cloud 9. (The hello.World virtual reality video example he shows is AWESOME!!!) The show that the students put on every year were PACKED!

One of the things he pointed out for the master's program, was that he did not have the patience for the book portion of the learning enviroment. I loved this! His class had 5 projects they had to get involved and do and they even took field trips. This, to me, makes perfect sense. If the student's can do the projects, they are either up to date with their book knowledge, or they are capable of finding the needed information. His university had people offering to hire his students even before they had been admitted...this is how accredited his program was. I also liked the idea of grading how you interact with your peers. If you can't learn how to co-exist with your classmates, how can you go into the real world and be around people with interest that may have nothing in common with yours.

He talks about his program Alice which is his "legacy." This is all about learning while having fun and having no clue that you are actually learning something hard. It's called the "Head Fake." How great is this. I know I want to incorporate this into my classroom if possible.

Towards the end of the video, he talks about his mother let him paint his bedroom like a submarine, and wow, you HAVE to see the pictures! I think his point on this one is to let kids express themselves! He also talks about how he was told others were perceiving him as arrogant and that could be holding his progress back. He tried to learn from everything, not pout! He says on the "Tigger/Eeyore" scale it is really obvious that he is a Tigger. He jokes about how there is a difference between what you do, and what your profession is. He wanted to stress about a "feed back loop," and how you need to listen to the criticism others have to offer. He also talks about Karma and how you need to be honest, earnest, etc... Maybe in fear of Karma, ha ha, he had a birthday cake brought out for his wife at the end of his lecture and had all 500 audience members sing happy birthday to her!

He wraps up his lecture with telling everyone if you lead your life the right way, Karma will take care of you and good things will happen. Then, he tells everyone this lecture was for his 3 children!

Pausch is such an inspiration and I hope that as a teacher I can display many of his qualities. Especially his belief that you should let the students be hands on! I am all about this! I have always believed that hands on is the best way to learn. I also agree with his belief about brick walls...they are there to weed out the slackers from the hard workers! His passing was a great loss in the world; I wish I could have been able to meet him or even take just one class under him before I take my leap into the world of teaching!