The final reflection is the last piece of writing in this course: one sustained look across your whole Math Journal, written in the final week. Every other entry looked at a single day. This one reads the entire record and answers the only question a course can really be measured by: what do you leave with that you did not arrive with?
Before you write
Reread your journal front to back in one sitting — expect the earliest entries to feel written by someone else. As you read, flag:
- one entry that embarrasses you a little — that is usually where the growth is buried
- one “what I would try” that you actually tried, and what happened
- one conjecture you made, and what became of it
The shape
Three sections, roughly a page, built the way Showing Growth taught — date it, quote your own words, then show the now:
- How my mathematics changed. The biggest difference between what week-one-you and now-you can do, proven with two cited entries — transformations becoming a recipe you trust, a set of tide data that told you which function family it wanted, a compound interest formula you can now take apart and rebuild.
- How my relationship with mathematics changed. The other axis, just as real: what being stuck feels like now, what you do when a period smells wrong, whether “I am not a math person” survived the semester. Your first entry is the baseline; quote it.
- Where the thinking goes next. Function thinking waits in Grade 12 and in every science that models change. Exponential reasoning returns in every loan and every population, the way Money Over Time promised. Sinusoidal models run through physics, music, and medicine. And the habit of asking whether a model deserves belief — the standard of What Makes a Model Good — is the template for every “convince me” you will ever face. Name where each one will find you.
Do not write it as a thank-you card
The temptation is to perform gratitude and round everything up. Resist it. The reflections worth reading include the unit that never clicked, the conjecture that died, the fog still standing. You have a semester of evidence that honesty is what makes this writing good. Trust it one last time.