Hello!
You are missing the excerpt, is this one?
So I called up my mentor, and I called up Andy Van Dam. And I said, Andy, I just gave a two-week assignment, and they came back and did stuff that if I had given them a whole semester I would have given them all As. Sensei, what do I do? [laughter] And Andy thought for a minute and he said, you go back into class tomorrow and you look them in the eye and you say, "Guys, that was pretty good, but I know you can do better." [laughter] And that was exactly the right advice. Because what he said was, you obviously don't know where the bar should be, and you're only going to do them a disservice by putting it anywhere. And boy was that good advice because they just kept going. . . .
In that sense, the answer would be:
Randy Pausch believes that his students, although they don't complete any task, they do have a good potential.
Hope have helped.
Home now: living in. home then: not living in
The sentence showed the part of the story where Marilyn is making letters for her family. She wants her brother to remember only the positive side of her. This is a paraphrase of the sentence. "She paused from time to time to think carefully on what words to say for her family, then she continued to write her letters."
