The Last Lecture: Part II

My dad was a World War II medic who served in the Battle of the Bulge. He founded a nonprofit group to help immigrants’ kids learn English. And for his livelihood, he ran a small business which sold auto insurance in inner-city Baltimore.

I grew up comfortably middle class in Columbia, Maryland. Money was never an issue in our house, mostly because my parents never saw a need to spend much. They were frugal to a fault.

It sounds oppressive by today’s standards, but it was actually a magical childhood.

We didn’t buy much. But we thought about everything. That’s because my dad had this infectious inquisitiveness about current events, history, our lives.

My dad was also an incredible storyteller, and he always said that stories should be told for a reason. He liked humorous anecdotes that turned into morality tales.

Part of that is because if you dispense your own wisdom, others often dismiss it; if you offer wisdom from a third party, it seems less arrogant and more acceptable.

Even these days, if someone asks her what I was like as a kid, she describes me as “alert, but not terribly precocious.”

We now live in an age when parents praise every child as a genius. And here’s my mother, figuring “alert” ought to suffice as a compliment.

Well, I wanted to have a quadratic formula on the wall. In a quadratic equation, the highest power of an unknown quantity is a square.

Maybe it was a symbol of the balance in my life between aspiration and pragmatism.

Maybe it was a symbol of the balance in my life between aspiration and pragmatism.

Turns out that NASA has a plane it uses to help astronauts acclimate to zero gravity.

Being weightless is a sensation hard to fathom when you’ve been an Earthling all your life.

I was heartbroken, but I was not deterred. I would find a way around this brick wall.

I decided to carefully read all the literature about the program, looking for loopholes.

As a college professor, I’ve seen this as one lesson so many kids ignore, always to their detriment: You’ve got to get the fundamentals down, because otherwise the fancy stuff is not going to work.

When I was finally dismissed, one of the assistant coaches came over to reassure me. “Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn’t he?” he said.
I could barely muster a “yeah.”

Coach Graham was livid: “Jeez! That’s the most I’ve seen you boys move since this game started!”

It saddens me that many kids today are so coddled.

What we really want them to learn is far more important: teamwork, perseverance, sportsmanship, the value of hard work, an ability to deal with adversity.

He never professed to have skills greater than his subordinates. He acknowledged that they knew what they were doing in their domains. But he established the vision, the tone. He was in charge of morale.

He never professed to have skills greater than his subordinates. He acknowledged that they knew what they were doing in their domains. But he established the vision, the tone. He was in charge of morale.

In the film, Starfleet cadets are faced with a simulated training scenario where, no matter what they do, their entire crew is killed.

Over the years, some of my sophisticated academic colleagues have turned up their noses at my Star Trek infatuation.

Tenacity is a virtue, but it’s not always crucial for everyone to observe how hard you work at something.

I am prepared now to reveal that there are two secrets to winning giant stuffed animals: long arms and a small amount of discretionary income.

I could predict what the tech-savvy cynics were thinking: In this age of digitally manipulated images, maybe those stuffed bears weren’t really in the pictures with me.

But I kept my mantra in mind: The brick walls are there for a reason.

“Dean Wormer” (as Jai dubbed him in homage to the film Animal House) was concerned that Disney would suck all this “intellectual property” out of my head that rightfully belonged to the university.

“Dean Wormer” (as Jai dubbed him in homage to the film Animal House) was concerned that Disney would suck all this “intellectual property” out of my head that rightfully belonged to the university.