it…out

I remember reading a headline online a few months ago about a “dying professor giving his last lecture.” It seemed like a pretty noble thing to do, and I pictured an old sickly man speaking to a lecture hall about important life lessons.

What I saw when I finally watched the video this weekend was a man in his 40s doing push-ups on stage and describing the tumors in his liver, all in the first few minutes, and then going on to completely blow my mind by explaining what’s really important in life. What’s more — this guy is a Computer Science (a field I happen to enjoy) professor. I naturally became even more interested and eventually watched the entire video.

This talk is inspiring, maybe –hopefully– even life-changing. My favorite quote was when he described the importance of always having fun in everything you do: “I don’t know how to not have fun. I’m dying, and I’m having fun, and I’m going to keep having fun every day I have left because there’s no other way to play it.”

He spoke of the importance of letting your children paint their bedroom walls with whatever they want and showed pictures of his own childhood bedroom. The man had the damn quadratic formula written on his wall! I hope I can inspire one tenth of that kind of creativity and drive in my own children.

I discovered that Dr. Pausch should not have been a complete stranger to me. It turns out he is the Computer Science professor from CMU that created Alice, a instructional 3D programming environment that I’ve used for teaching a programming class for junior high students at the South Dakota Governor’s Camp for Gifted Children (of which Lindsey is an alum).

I later discovered that after giving the talk linked above, he also spoke about the importance of time management, being somewhat of an authority on the subject as he has less than a year to live. It was also a great video.

I’m off to buy Tommy some paint. Now go watch the video.