Write this in the first week, before the course has had a chance to change your mind about anything. Roughly 300 words, answering five things.
- Where you are starting. This is your first course that is only chemistry. What made you choose it — genuinely, including “it is a prerequisite for something else” — and what do you already like or dislike about it? Name the actual event if you can: a class, a lab, a thing somebody said.
- What you believe about how chemistry knows things. One sentence. Not the textbook answer, the one you actually hold. Nobody has ever seen an atom with their eyes, and yet the periodic table on the wall is treated as settled. How do you think that happened?
- What you want to be able to explain by the end of the course. Something specific, not “chemistry”. “Why some things dissolve in water and some do not” is specific. “Why my hair dye works” is specific and better.
- Your worry. One thing you expect to find hard. Naming it now is what lets you notice, later, the week it stops being hard.
- Your arithmetic history. Where you stand with calculations, honestly. This course does more of them than Grade 10 did, and I would rather know in the first week than in the fourth.
Honesty is the only requirement
“I have never liked science and I am taking it because I need it for the program I want” is a perfectly good first entry. It is also, reliably, the entry that is most interesting to re-read in the last week of the semester — which is exactly what Showing Growth asks you to do.
Question 5 is not a diagnostic test and nothing you write there is held against you. It exists so that if the arithmetic is what is in your way in Unit 3, we both already know it is the arithmetic and not the chemistry, and we can fix the right thing.
Question 2 is the one worth taking most seriously, because this course is going to argue with it repeatedly. Come back at the end and see whether you would still write the same sentence.