Sharing the Addiction

I have been feeling rather sad this morning as I have watched a few videos about Randy Pausch and I just wanted to comment on his powerful messages the day after he finally lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. I watched the movie of his last lecture not long after it was posted last year in September and you can see it here:

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=the+last+lecture&hl=en&sitesearch=#

I ended up watching the entire 108 minutes of the video without being bored. He was a really remarkable guy! This video was watched 1000000 times in the first month of being online. It is now a best selling book titled ‘The Last Lecture’.

There is a Wikipedia page devoted to Randy which you can go and have a look at here. It has a few of the better known quotes from the video including:

• “The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the OTHER people!” — from The Last Lecture

Hear hear! One of Art Costa’s ‘Habits of the Mind’ is perseverance and we need to be helping children to develop this attribute.  When in a classroom, I used the ‘Learning pit’ idea to help children understand that frustration at points in the learning process is perfectly normal. Recently, on a school visit to Viscount School in Auckland, I saw a classroom teacher that asks students to hold up the number of fingers that represent where students are in terms of new learning (1 to 4 on the diagram).

Clinton Golding also talks about building up resilience with kids which I blogged about at http://sharetheaddiction.edublogs.org/2007/12/07/clinton-golding-on-developing-thinking-classrooms/. “If we only ask children to lift light ‘thinking weights’ we can’t expect them to develop their ‘thinking muscles’. We therefore need to make things just a little too hard for them at times where the children don’t know the answer AND don’t know how to solve the answer.” Then children begin to develop strategies for dealing with those ‘brick walls’.

I think another important aspect of making this happen is to accept and even value the failures that happen while working towards goals both as teachers and students. In the video, it shows that Randy had a special award for the students that failed in the most spectacular way during the year. His students often created the most amazing things due to the atmosphere he created through this acceptance of failure while still expecting students to continue working towards goals and setting high expectations.

• “…when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering you to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are the ones telling you they still love you and care.” — from The Last Lecture

I sometimes wonder how well we give constructive feedback in schools. Teachers often give their students pointers on how to improve their work but how often do we as teachers talk about our failures in the classroom in staff meetings and use that as the basis for discussion? Teachers are often intimidated and threatened by the idea of having another adult in the classroom while they teach but surely we should be embracing this kind of opportunity so that we can get honest feedback from peers. I think a lot of this stems from a lack of trust between teachers in a school which goes back to the importance of building great relationships between staff. We should all be open to the idea that we could be doing things better. Recently, I have worked on some bits and pieces and then sent my work out to others to critique which they did with many ideas on improvements. The changes that I made as a result meant a much higher quality output - I didn’t necessarily agree to every suggestion but I welcomed them all. At times, I felt myself responding defensively to some ideas but then I tried to take a step back and take my ego out of it. I didn’t always completely succeed but when I was willing to be flexible and try making changes, the result was always much better in the end.  I think school leaders are getting too bogged down in administration details to always be able to fulfill this mentoring role in classrooms or to be able to develop the level of trust with staff to the point they welcome this kind of input and I think this is a problem that needs to be addressed.

Anyway - I spent the morning sniffling into tissues as I watched a series of videos about Randy. I have embedded a short and sweet video of him addressing a group of students in May of this year at their graduation ceremony:

Tags: randy_pausch, thinking

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