Field Notes 6

For this week of observations I decided to focus on broad observations of what goes on at my field site as opposed to a detailed observation of a small portion of what happens. To accomplish this I decided to once again conduct my observations at an early morning time between 9:05 am and 10:15 am on Wednesday October 8^th.

My observations began after most of the students had already gone to their classes, but a few stragglers where still making there way to the appropriate classrooms. While this happened it appeared that the amount of students studying on their own and in small groups as well as students not studying or in class was at a minimum. This was likely due to the early time of day that very few student that were not in class would be discouraged from arriving early and where likely either sleeping or preparing for the day at home. Of those students that where studying most where studying on their own however there where to small groups of three in the carbon and nitrogen buildings respectively. These groups appeared to be reading from text-books and asking each other questions about the materials in those books. It also appeared that the different subjects that the groups and individual students were studying was almost completely divisible by building with only two exceptions.

Similar to what happened during my third week of field observations a few students from one of the classrooms in the hydrogen building left and began to read independently in the commons of that building. Despite being a similar pattern to the one I had previously observed the event as different a few ways. First the amount of students that left from the classroom was only five as opposed to the entire class which the previous time. The students that exited also appeared to come from a different classroom than the previous group leading me to believe that this is a strategy being used by one of the teachers to help students that fall behind to catch up without disrupting the class.

It appeared that the day I had chosen for my observations was also chosen by the school administration to give a tour of the school. The group that the tour was being given to appeared to be from Albuquerque and was wearing merchandise from that city and a college in that city. It appeared the group being given the tour was interested in the way the school is run and about how the school has operated.  It seemed like the group was there to see how he school operated, possibly in preparation to open another school similar to the one where I conduct my observations.

In conclusion, this week’s observations showed the continuation of patterns that had been previously observed and showed some new events that are possibly isolated but could possibly be repeated.