March 25, 2015 - 11:39
While I was slightly disappointed that I didn't get to choose a meeting place that was actually outside, I was pretty content in my odd choice of location. Meeting in the basement of English House was inconenvient but I also noticed that people seemed to pay more attention to each other because we were in such close proximity to each other. During classes before, I've found that you can participate without feeling obligated to make direct eye contact with the person speaking but when we were sitting right next to each other, it seemed a ot more like a conversation and therefore the option of looking elsewhere wasn't as available. I also noticed that people were comfortable taking their shoes off and putting their feet on the sofa, adding even more to the informal, 'conversation' aesthetic.
I also found that even though people were disrupting the class in having to go to the bathroom, we didn't go off topic for too long. We seemed to be able to bring the discussion back fairly quickly. It seemed like it made the people who actually had to use the bathroom FAR more uncomfortable than it did us (naturally).
There were, however, a few things I noted that seemed to go less smoothly than usual. When we split into pairs to have smaller conversations, it was sometimes difficult to pay complete attention to what the person you were paired with was saying because it seemed like every conversation was happening at the decibel level. Even though we were so close together, I found I had to strain sometimes to hear what Abby was saying over what the pair behind me or the pair to my left was discussing.
Overall I felt that people were slightly more comfortable in the more confined space because it was more like a conversation, but it was also kind of like a dinner party, where a million conversations are happening at once and you feel tempted to partake in another one even though you're having one of your own.