Since I was young, I’ve had a habit of keeping track of
different things via tally marks. As I’m already inclined to do this, I thought
I might make my observations for this report in the same fashion.
As the general safety on campus is one everyone’s mind, I
tried to observe things that I thought of as safety concerns. Overall, the
results were surprising in that they did not reflect what I, perhaps naively,
imagined campus to look like, as a place highly concerned with safety. While
the signage on campus urges safety, the people did not.
The following are the numbers observed through two trips to
campus:
People w/ masks on inside: |||| |||| |||| |||| ||
People w/o masks on inside: |||
People w/ masks on outside: |||| |||| |||| |||| |
People w/o masks on outside: |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| ||||
|||| |||| |||| ||||
Groups larger than 3 or more (inside or outside): |||| ||||
|||| |
I don’t want to take my observations as definitive data,
because I was one person making observations in a piece-meal way. I cannot see
everything. But I do have enough faith in my lifelong habit to believe that
what I saw might proportionally be reflected in actual numbers of these
occurrences on campus.
My observations were juxtaposed to my imaginations of campus
- the sheer number of people without masks on, even though most were outside;
how many people were in groups, easily ignoring the calls for social distancing
by the many and varied signs on campus. The signs were part of my imagination,
but the reactions to (or rather, lack of reaction) them was not.
Our readings this week pointed out the way that making
begins at imagination but is later fed by observations and critique. Since my
imagination worked in contrast to my observations, I am finding it easy to
critique the school, the students, and all the people who seemingly disregard
the safety of campus. But is my 'making' of campus and the effects of COVID-19
the only one? In reflecting on my observations, I'm thinking about how the data
I presented here can be interpreted in different ways, 'made' in different ways
based each individual's imagination, observations, and critiques. Perhaps my
observations would have been more effective as a reflective narrative, so that
it is only of my own making?