The last lecture
Only a few months to live
Randy Pausch, in what was his Last Lecture, stood before his university colleagues and told them “there are approximately ten tumors in my liver and the doctors told me three to six months of good health left. That was a month ago, so you can do the math. I have some of the best doctors in the world.
“So, that is what it is. We can’t change it, and we just have to decide how we’re going to respond to that. We can not change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”
Whew!
Wherever we are, life has brought us this far. But what if we imagined, like what happened to Pausch, that we had at the most “three to six months of good health left.” Would we continue with our life as it is? Would we find humor, as Pausch did? Would we take ‘a last shot’ at being the person we wanted to be, a new path for the rest of our time on this planet?
We may think it strange to treat life with a sense of urgency. For much of our life we may work day-to-day without much thought that it could end anytime soon. Pausch alerts us to rethink how we might look at life. As he said, “We can not change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”
We should play as if we have a royal flush every day.
Many teachers sign contract after contract knowing some day they will retire. They have students for a year before having to say goodbye, then welcome another group in the fall––and another and another until they retire. This rhythm is not unlike other professions.
After discovering Pausch’s “Last Lecture” during my final year of teaching, I reframed his predicament. In mid-year, I said to myself, “I have only a few months left with my students. My one last shot at being the teacher I want to be for them.”
I invoked a sense of urgency. My last chance to be with students, to discover new ways to teach, to do what I loved.
Given that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward” (Kierkegaard), I write to bring ideas and methods from my life as a teacher in the latter half of the 20th century to help teachers and the public to “live forward” in this century. My latest book, “Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way” is available on Amazon. And I welcome comments here on my Substack or by email at frankthoms3@gmail.com.