We wrote about this last August: CMU Professor Gives His Last Lesson on Life. If you haven’t seen the lecture I encourage you to do so now. Now there is a book by Dr. Randy Pausch called The Last Lecture where he expands on his lecture with “many more stories from my life and the attendant lessons I hope my kids can take from them.”
Like any teacher, my students are my biggest professional legacy. I’d like to think that the people I’ve crossed paths with have learned something from me, and I know I learned a great deal from them, for which I am very grateful. Certainly, I’ve dedicated a lot of my teaching to helping young folks realize how they need to be able to work with other people–especially other people who are very different from themselves.
Related: William G. Hunter: An Innovator and Catalyst for Quality Improvement by George Box – Inspirational Engineer – Tour the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab – What Kids can Learn – Sarah, aged 3, Learns About Soap – Some more on my father – Science Books
How inspiring Randy Pausch is! If you liked “The Last Lecture”, another fantastic memoir I just read and highly recommend is “My Stroke of Insight” by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. Her TEDTalk video (ted.com) has been seen as many times as The Last Lecture I think, and Oprah did 4 shows on her book, so there are a lot of similarities. In My Stroke of Insight, there’s a happy ending though. It’s an incredible story! I hear they’re making it into a movie.
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