Blog Assignment # 6

Achieving Your Childhood Dreams Randy Pausch is a powerful speaker. He is entertaining and a joy to listen to. He makes great points about the things you should strive for in life. He speaks about truths and realities. He doesn't sugarcoat anything and he doesn't only talk about the successful things in life.

He has a great lecture about goals that everyone could learn something from. I'm sure we have all said that we have goals in life. But have you ever really thought about specific goals? I know I have not until now. I have had a goal to be a teacher but I think that our goals should be more specific. I want to be a successful teacher that students truly learn from. I think that we need to teach our students about having goals and we need to teach them to be specific about it. As I learned from this video, our goals can also be changed as it needs to be fit. Our goals might be unrealistic as we are younger, but as we grow we can tweak them to be realistic with a chance of reaching them. I think everyone should have goals. Without them, what do you strive for in life?

Another great topic from this video was about brick walls. In our lifetime, we will come to dead ends and be turned away from our goals. Not everything we want will be given to us the first time. Randy explained the purpose of these brick walls. They are good for us and we need to portray this message to our students. Brick walls are there to weed out those who are not truly serious about moving forward. When faced with a brick wall, we will reevaluate what we really want in life. If we want to show dedication, we will find a way to get through the brick wall. We should never give up if it is something we really want in our life. I want to teach this motivation to my students one day. Just because one door might close, or one brick wall comes up, it doesn't mean that we should give up and walk away from it. We need to teach our students to strive for something and go after what they want!

I learned a lot of lessons that I want to remember when I have a classroom of my own one day. The first is about setting a bar for students. When Randy said that his students went over his bar he had set in the first two weeks of his class, I really started to think about it. I think it is very important to be careful when setting bars for our students. If we set them to low, it could have a negative effect on our students and they might think that they are not capable of raising the bar. In Randy's case, the bar was reached by the students and then he was not sure of what to do not. I think in a way, our students should set their own bars but with their teachers beside them in guidance. If we teach them how to set goals and how to strive in their life, then they will set their own bars high enough that will keep them reaching until they succeed. A few other things that I think all teachers should keep in mind when they are with their students is to remember the fun. If we want out students to learn something and actually remember it, make the material fun. A great concept from the video is this question, "Are you a Tigger or Eeyore?" I never want to be a teacher like Eeyore. Hopefully, none of us have the intentions of being a drag. Randy also mentioned to never lose the childlike wonder. If we do, I think this is where the Eeyore's come in. If we can remember what it is like to think like a child, we just might come across to them in a much more effective way.

The last two things I want to mention about the video is that we should always help other because loyalty is a two way street. If we want to trust our students to make the right choices, they need to be able to trust that we are making the right choices when it comes to teaching them and preparing them for their future. We need to always keep their best interest at heart. Never give up on our own lives and never give up on our students!