Blog post #8

Blog Post #8

After watching , Randy's Last Lecture all I can say is that if I found out I had cancer and was dying I only hope that I could have at least half of his happiness and joy. This video has taught me so much, not just on how to teach children, but how I want to live my life chasing my dreams. In this video, Randy talked a lot about his childhood dreams and how, even though he wasn’t a NFL player like he wanted to be, that he learned a lot through the experience. I learned that it is very important to teach children to have childhood dreams, and ones that may seem impossible, because even if you don’t reach that dream, you will learn something from the process. At the beginning of his lecture he tells us that he has tumors on his kidney and is dying and yet he looks and acts happy and healthy. He is dealing with his cancer in a way that is so inspiring. Randy says, “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand”, and this to me has so much truth behind it that we need to be teaching to the younger generation. As a teacher, I hope I can teach my students not to feel sorry for things they don’t have or how they were raised, instead, be happy and find a way to change the situation, whatever it may be. Randy said that when you mess up look for someone to correct you, if there isn’t someone correcting you, then that means that they have given up on you. I have never thought about that, but it is so true. As a child, whenever you do something wrong over and over again and your parents or teacher is correcting you over and over again they are doing this not because they want to repeat it over and over again, but because they care enough about you to constantly repeat themselves until you get it right. I hope that, once I become a teacher, I will have the patience and willingness to show my students in a loving way how much I care for them by always correcting them until they have mastered it. I learned that it is important not to set a bar for students because students will surprise you with how far they can go when you do not set a goal for them to reach. Another thing that I learned from Randy was “the best gift an educator can give a student is to teach someone to be self reflective”. This is very important in project based learning, especially in group work. The major thing I learned from Randy was Project Based Learning is students having fun while learning something hard or something they might not have wanted to learn if it wasn’t fun. If we make learning a fun experience then children will have a desire to want to learn more and work hard. I also learned from Randy as a teacher I should teach “head fake” learning. “Head fake” learning is when you teach two topics at the same time. Lastly, there were two statements that stuck out to me most in Randy’s lecture. The first statement was, “Never to lose the child like wonder”. As Randy was talking, you could tell that he was still a child at heart and he loved teaching his students. I think that as teachers if we still have a child like heart that loves to be happy and loves learning and teaching, then our students will be better off from that. The second statement that impressed me was actually a question he asked, “Are you Tigger or Eeyore?” Meaning are you going to be looking for the good in things or always looking at the bad in things? Which one are you?