Blog Assignment #6

I thought this was a great picture to use for this blog because in his lecture he said he is a "tigger". He always has fun, and this is how I will think of him. He made a lot of jokes and has a great outlook on life.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture was very inspiring and taught a lot of good life lessons. He talked about his childhood dreams, enabling the dreams of others, and how to achieve your childhood dreams. A lot of the things he talked about had some good teaching techniques.
The first teaching technique I got out of this lecture was, "brick walls are there to let us prove how badly we want things." He mentioned this line several times trough-out this lecture. I have never thought about this before, but now that I have, I think it is so true! He goes on to say that brick walls are there to stop the "other" people. It only allows the ones who are willing to take the time and effort to climb over it to achieve that goal.
Another teaching technique I learned in this lecture is to have fun! As a student, I know how important it is to have fun while learning. Let's face it, if we don't have fun or at least enjoy what we are learning, do we really learn it? Now as a teacher, I will have to figure out how to make my classroom have fun. Whether it's incorporating a game in history, or a craft in math. I need to get some creative ideas so I become a teacher like him and teach students that learning can be fun.
An underlined technique I caught was that failure is okay. No one likes to fail, but it will happen at some point in time to everyone. So embrace it and move on, or try harder and get more experience. Mr. Pausch didn't get into the college he applied to for a graduate program, but he didn't give up. He got a mentor of his to talk to the admissions and got a second chance.
He had a technique called "head fake" where he made the students think they were learning one thing, but in fact were learning something different. This is a technique I will possibly use in my classroom.
I really liked this lecture. It wasn't boring, and it was very easy to watch. He had interesting things to talk about that didn't stray from the topics he had outlined. This man really knew how to give a lecture. He also knew how to incorporate hands on learning for students. His building virtual worlds assignment was astonishing. I could never in a million years imagine being able to come up with some of the things his students did. He must have been a great teacher. I hope one day I will be as great as he was.