Field Notes 8

For this week’s field notes I decided to conduct my observations at the same time period as the previous week. This decision was made to get a more complete understanding of how the people who stay in this part of the school behave at this time of the day. My observations this week where conducted between 12:40 pm and 1:30 pm on Thursday October 23.

I began my observations in the hydrogen building to view the buildings in a pattern opposite to the one I had during the previous week’s observations.  As my observations began the hydrogen build in was sparsely populated with only two students studying independently on different sides of the commons. These students where different from the students that had been studying in the commons the previous week leading me to conclude that both sets of students had schedules that changed when they could be at the building depending on the day. Like the previous week it appeared that there is very little activity in the buildings during class periods before the first large influx of students before the next class period. I stayed in this building for fifteen minutes after the beginning of my observations, during this time the only activity I observed was the continued studying of the students that were present at the beginning and students coming from the classes to uses the restrooms or water fountains. After the first fifteen minutes of observations I went to the carbon building to observe what was happening in that building.

The activity in the carbon building at that time, about 12:57, was similar to the activity in the hydrogen building with three students studying individually and students coming from classrooms to use water fountains and restrooms. This remained the same for about ten minutes before a male and female student, the same students that had been acting flirtatiously in this building the previous week, came from the direction of the parking lot and began acting the same way they had the previous week. This was the only change to the status quo for about five minutes when two of the students that had been studying on their own left toward the nitrogen and oxygen building respectively. Around this time, 1:14, it seemed like there had been an influx of students to the hydrogen building so I decided to try observe what was happening in that building after the influx.

In the hydrogen building the number of students had gone from two to seven which was a greater increase than I had expected after seeing three students enter the building. While one of the students was still studying on her own she was not one of the original two students that had been in the building at the beginning of my observations. At this point in the period all the other students in the commons had begun engaging in conversation and even the students that had originally been studying had stopped and where conversing as well.