Blog 7: On Realizing "Head Fakes" and Pausch's Last Lecture

Pausch's Last Lecture
Pausch has the right attitude to be in education (and life, for that matter--I was tickled at the joke about "If you're going to tell me you have some herbal supplements for me to take, stay away"). He mentioned that enabling the dreams of others is even more fun. This is the way it should be for an educator. It is unfortunate the number of people who go into the field because they like to hear their own voice (or because they really like the months June, July, and August). Being an educator means finding out ways you can enable others to realize and achieve the things that THEY want to do; not what you want them to do. Impossible is [still] nothing. As educators, we should realize that permission to dream is huge. A lot of students need the inspiration.

He also said that “walls are there for us to prove how badly we want things.” We don’t want to think of things this way. We want to prove that we want something by saying that we want it, but the work barely moves on from there. This is not finger-pointing, but realistically speaking, no one ever really wants to run into walls or to have to prove themselves. To quote a cheesy Marvel Comic Quote from Spiderman: "With great power comes great responsibility." As future educators, there will be many walls. We should knock them down because we want better for our society, for our children, and for our future.

Critics are ironically there for support. If you’re doing something where you don’t receive any criticism, it means people have given up hope. Don’t get upset when someone tells you how you could’ve done better. Let the advice soak in, and make practical changes. It's the hardest part, but certainly the most beneficial.

He talks about putting artists and engineers together. In This is How We Dream Richard E. Miller talks about putting the sciences and the humanities together. We are in a place in our global system that in order to move forward, we must collaborate. In order for good ideas not to die out just as good ideas, we have to work together. We are at a place where we have the technology to collaborate. Now we just have to figure out how to get that communication to move from “let’s talk about me, and what I want, and my ideas, and making everyone else work on my ideas” to “this is our project, we’re all doing the work”. This is the only way to for any field to progress in this age. It takes action, and it takes togetherness in that action.

Another important point was about "head fakes". The man spoke for an hour and at the very end, he revealed the greatest one about his lecture. Pausch said “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.” Head-fake learning is important, and it's everywhere. Sometimes you learn something completely different than what you set out to learn. "The best way to teach someone something, is to make them think their learning something else." (I'm looking at you, Dr. Strange).

This isn't what's meant by the phrase: