Name:Date:
How to use this sheet. A tree writes its ring while it grows. A hard year leaves a narrow ring; a fire leaves a scar. Nothing is written up afterwards, and nothing is sanded off. This is your ring for one week.
- Fill in each day that day, in your own words. Short is fine.
- Keep the hard parts in. A record with the hard parts taken out is just a shorter one, and it teaches less.
STEP 1
The week, day by day
Three columns: what happened, what went sideways, what I tried.
| Day | What happened | What went sideways | What I tried |
|---|
| Mon | | | |
| Tue | | | |
| Wed | | | |
| Thu | | | |
| Fri | | | |
| Sat | | | |
| Sun | | | |
Clarify — "What went sideways" is not a confession. It is the part of the ring that shows the weather. Leave it in.
STEP 2
The scar
One hard thing from this week, in your own words — not the tidy version.
✍️ What happened, and what it felt like
→ Flip to page 2 at the end of the week.
Name:Date:
Programs are good at recording successes. What a person tried and set down usually goes unrecorded — and that is where self-knowledge lives. This page keeps it.
1Something I set down this week
A goal, a plan, or a habit you stopped. Write the real reason, and what you chose instead. Setting something down on purpose is a decision, not a failure.
2Something I kept going
Even when it was hard. What made it possible to keep going?
3The hard part, one week later
Look at the scar on page 1. Does it look the same now? What do you know that you did not know on that day?
4What I want someone else to know about this week
The person who reads your record cannot see the week. Tell them the one thing that matters.
⭐ Read this again on: ______ / ______ (one month from today)
When you come back, write one line here about what grew on top of this week:
The trunk shows the hard year and the growth after it. Both, or it is not a record.
FOR MENTOR USE — READ FIRST (not printed with the student sheet)
Mentor Guide
Companion to How Nature Remembers on tervik.org/journey
1. What this sheet builds
A record the student writes while it happens, in their own voice, that keeps the hard parts. The essay's argument: a program ends up accountable to whatever its record captures, and a person can only grow past a hard month they can still see.
2. Running it
- Two minutes a day beats twenty on Friday. Ask for it at the same moment each day.
- Never rewrite their words into yours. If it is unclear, ask a question and let them add a line.
- The set down question (page 2, Q1) is the important one. Treat a set-down goal as information about the person, not as a miss.
3. The debrief
- Read the ring back to them once, plainly, before discussing it. Being heard accurately is most of the point.
- Ask Q3 out loud: does the hard part look the same a week later? Usually it does not, and noticing that is the lesson.
- Put the one-month date in a calendar. The re-read is where the sheet pays off.
4. Where it goes
The sheet belongs to the student. If your program keeps records, this is the kind of note that should feed them — in the student's language, not translated for a file.