Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch is an inspirational lecture by a professor of computer science who was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Professor Randy Pausch was a 47-year-old man who had a wife and three small children—and three months to live. With precious time to waste, he felt the need to deliver one last message to his students, and mainly to his kids. His lecture wasn’t about coping with dying. It was about living. The lecture was titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” but it went into so much more than that. Pausch weaved his optimism through stories of his life. While the cancer lingered as a backdrop, the meat of the book contained tools for living an abundant life. He urged the need to never give up, the determination to follow your dreams and enable the dreams of others, as well as simple common sense tips like always telling the truth. Some of his anecdotes were poignant. Some were funny like the “dream” balloon ride with his new bride on their wedding day. As a teacher, Randy was direct and demanding. He had high expectations of his students and wanted them to reach their potential. Pausch said: “I’m a scientist who sees inspiration as the ultimate tool for doing good.” He was actually talking about the inspiration of the moon landing in 1969, but he could just as well have been talking about himself. With this book he leaves a force of motivation, not just for his students, but for others, too. This book is saturated with life lessons for all of us.
Randy Pausch died on July 25, 2008.
I’m a scientist who sees inspiration as the ultimate tool
for doing good.
Randy Pausch, The Last
Lecture (New York: Hyperion, 2008), 132.
The brick walls are
there for a reason. They’re not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance
to show how badly we want something.
Randy Pausch, The Last
Lecture (New York: Hyperion, 2008), 51-52.
…failure is not just acceptable, it’s often essential.
Randy Pausch, The Last
Lecture (New York: Hyperion, 2008), 148.
 |
| Mr. Edward Turek |
Professor Pausch seems like one of those teachers where
people lined up to get in his class. Mr.
Turek’s class was like that. Marriage
and Family, or something like that, was the name of the class that everyone at
Eldorado High School wanted to get into. It was the class where you got to
carry around an egg for a few weeks pretending it was your baby. It was
supposed to be a lesson in responsibility, but for us teens, it was pure fun. Like an infant, the egg was fragile and you
had to take it everywhere with you or arrange for babysitting. I really wanted to get into that class, but
it was an elective, and electives were handled in an unusual manner back
then. Elective registration day was a
normal day at the end of the school year, with one exception. Instead of
attending our regular classes, when the bell rang we had run to the elective
classroom and take a seat. But like I
said, Marriage and Family was a popular class.
There was an incident. Injuries
occurred. Tempers flared. No eggs would have survived.
When the bell rang that day, I was ready. Like most people, I had worn a good pair of
tennis shoes so I could sprint to Mr Turek’s Marriage and Family class. Unfortunately, it was located on the other
side of the school and I reached his door at the same time as a mob of other
students arrived. We all tried to squish through the door at the same time.
People were pushing and screaming.
Someone lost their shoe in the doorway. An elbow met someone’s eye. I guess the parenting training was already
underway. These teens were getting ready
for their future kids’ soccer games.
Mr. Turek took command. He was a big man and quickly
controlled the mob. Like sheep everyone
stopped pushing and slowly, orderly filed into the classroom. Sadly, by the time I made my way into the room, I was out of
luck. There were no more seats to be
had. I was kicked off the team. The rejected ones left the classroom quietly,
much different than our arrival. So with
our heads hung we searched for other elective courses. But by that time all the other cool electives
were also full. I finally found my way
to the Music Appreciation course way out behind the cafeteria along with the
three other people who had nowhere to go.
The teacher was nice enough, but there were no eggs involved in this
class. That, and the fact that I didn't
play an instrument or sing, left me feeling out of sorts. A few days later I transferred to a Shorthand
class. Ask me how much I remember about that one. That was the last year electives were
handled in the “sprint and sit” fashion.
 |
| H.B. "Playing in the yard." |
I moved on, but I wasn't happy about it. What added salt to
my wound was that my little sister got into the class the following year. And there she was with her cute little egg all
dressed up taking pictures with him on the lawn. Such a happy little family. In keeping with
the trends of the time, his name was H.B., sort of like J.R. Ewing on the TV
show Dallas. I don’t know what J.R. ever stood for, but
H.B. was short for hard boiled. For me it was a hard boiled lesson that you
don’t always get what you want in life.
But I can’t complain. I now have
two kids of my own—the real life kind.
No eggs here. Life is good.
Other teachers who have made a difference in my life: Mr. Erbe and Mr. Haynes, and of course, Mrs. Vento.
Happy reading!
Annette
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