Sage Plagge's Edu Blog

     Goodbyes are always bittersweet but mostly sweet, I think of it like coming to the end of a large journey, all the hard work has finally paid off. But you will miss all the friends, the students, you made along the way. I always get a little teary eyed as I see my students walk in the classroom for the last time during my placements, but it always gets easier near the end of my time on the last day, the sense of accomplishment will always motivate me to go again!      I have a tradition for my placements, questions are part of being a teacher. Students will talk to you and ask about your interests. I give them the opportunity to do this at the beginning and end of the placements. I don't really want a big party or event or anything like that because I feel to pressured to make it so amazing that it keeps any and all sad emotions down, but then my CT has to deal with the fallout, so I keep it simple and clean.      For this placement, I u...

     Parent communication is a tricky subject. I have not really done parent communication much outside of my own newsletters for my diagnostic class. Newsletters are the primary way that my current CT communicates with parents.      Obviously one way to communicate is via emails and messaging. This is more common in our ever more technological world, I have seen a growing number of examples of teachers being available through text and or emails. My CTs have talked about how they might just message, call, or maybe even have group chats with parents. My current teacher even has been called directly by parents from time to time. I have had exactly one conference with a parent before for diagnostic, and plan to go to conferences for my first placement.      The parent connections I have seen is maybe parents come in every now and again to drop something off, and at my current placement the students can have lunch with their parents, which gives ...

 One of the specific pieces of feedback I have asked for is for my advisor and CT to watch my pacing, as I have had a history with dragging things out for a little too lang. This was first pointed out to me during my math placement, where it would sometimes take me 20 minutes to do a simple warm up. I have been told that whilst I am very thorough when I teach, I can be too thorough sometimes. There are times where I have this whole strategy in my head to help students understand the concepts they will be learning about and by the time we get to that point, sometimes not even a quarter of the way through my demonstration, it feels like half the class already knows what I'm talking about.  So why do I keep going? Why not just stop and move on? Well, part of it is routine, I write very script like lesson plans so I don't always have the best improv, so I just keep trucking. The main feedback I have received when talking about this idea is student engagement, students who already ...