Your final course reflection should be at least ~1200 words and cover the ENTIRE COURSE. As a final effort, you need to do two things:
Describing what you learned means describing what’s now different in your thinking about food or American history or identity or whatever compared to what it was in August because what we did this term. If you didn’t learn anything, explain how the readings were not challenging for you. Then I still know you engaged with them.
This is what separates excellent from mediocre reflections. To say that “I learned to think more critically about authenticity” is fine AS LONG AS you provide several SPECIFIC EXAMPLES of the issues that you think are important to think critically about and WHY. But if you just make a vague statement that you learned about a topic on the syllabus, and don’t provide any examples from the readings, I can only assume it’s because you didn’t read or learn very much.
The more you can tie themes together and speak about the course as a whole (while giving specific examples from the readings), the higher your score will be. You should absolutely use the quizzes and reflections to remind you of what you were thinking. But you need to go beyond these as well to reflect on the course as a whole.
There’s no right answer, oviously. This is an opinion aspect of the final, that asks you to describe what you were interested in, or not, and what kinds of topics or reeadings resonated with you, or didn’t. It’s just another angle to show me how you engaged with the course.
Remember, it is your responsibility to differentiate yourself from an AI response, which is super easy if you’ve actually done any work for the course. In case you haven’t discovered it for yourself, AI can’t write very convincingly about human experiences (it just sounds super fake), nor does it really know what WE have done in this course (even if you give it the syllabus; it still won’t read everything). If your response sounds like AI, I just grade it super hard to lower your grade as much as I can get away with.
This final assignment is vague on purpose so you can tell me what you’ve gotten out of the course. It’s different for everyone. But if you feel lost about what to do, please reach out so we can chat and get on solid ground.