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...well , another teachers day.....n i guess all of you will be tired of reading the mundane stuff....so i have posted an extract from the famous Last lecture series of late Dr Randy Pausch(arguably one of the most loved teachers in the universe)-for those who are unaware-He was a Professor of Computer Science at the famous Carnegie Mellon University who died on July 25,2008 suffering from pancreatic cancer...n if you find this piece good enough go on & exploit his contributions to the student community.......

This is an extract from his speech on "Really achieving childhood dreams" given on September 18,2007 at Carnegie Mellon University


OK, let’s talk about football. My dream was to play in the National Football League. And most of
you don’t know that I actually – no. [laughter] No, I did not make it to the National Football League,
but I probably got more from that dream and not accomplishing it than I got from any of the ones
that I did accomplish. I had a coach, I signed up when I was nine years old. I was the smallest kid in
the league, by far. And I had a coach, Jim Graham, who was six-foot-four, he had played linebacker
at Penn State. He was just this hulk of a guy and he was old school. And I mean really old school.
Like he thought the forward pass was a trick play. [laughter] And he showed up for practice the first
day, and you know, there’s big hulking guy, we were all scared to death of him. And he hadn’t
brought any footballs. How are we going to have practice without any footballs? And one of the
other kids said, excuse me coach, but there’s no football. And Coach Graham said, right, how many
men are on a football field at a time? Eleven on a team, twenty-two. Coach Graham said, all right,
and how many people are touching the football at any given time? One of them. And he said, right,
so we’re going to work on what those other twenty-one guys are doing. And that’s a really good
story because it’s all about fundamentals. Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. You’ve got
to get the fundamentals down because otherwise the fancy stuff isn’t going to work. And the other
Jim Graham story I have is there was one practice where he just rode me all practice. You’re doing
this wrong, you’re doing this wrong, go back and do it again, you owe me, you’re doing push-ups
after practice. And when it was all over, one of the other assistant coaches came over and said,
yeah, Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn’t he? I said, yeah. He said, that’s a good thing. He
said, when you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave
up. And that’s a lesson that stuck with me my whole life. Is that when you see yourself doing
something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your
critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care.