1.)   The class I decided to observe for this assignment was my sociology class, this class meets twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday. The Tuesday class is a lecture class that starts at 11 am and goes for about two hours, and the Thursday class starts at 10 am and goes for an hour. I decided to observe the Thursday class. On this day the attendance in class was less than half the whole class, there were only 11 women and 5 men (including myself). Throughout the duration of the class, the women participated more often than the men. The final tally was, women participated 10 times, and men only participated 2 times. I feel like the topic of discussion in class is what contributed to the lack of participation from male students, we were discussing gender and that probably made them hesitate to give input.

 2.)   On average when women spoke, they talked from 35 seconds to 50 seconds and at least 100 words. For men, their average speaking time was for 25 to 35 seconds and with usually less than a hundred words. The women gave more in-depth and complete answers, and the men’s answers were short and did not really get the most out of their responses.

 3.)   The usual thought is that, men are more assertive and display strong body language when speaking and that women are more reserved and hesitant to speak. That was not the case in today’s class, most of the time when the women spoke they were assertive and loud, and their body language reflected that they were confident in what they were saying. When the men spoke, they were not as vocal, and the body language was poor. One of the men who answered, his voice was low, he had to repeat himself a couple times and he was hunched over with his elbows resting on his knees. The majority of the class revolved around our thoughts and reactions to a video, the video was a clip from a law and order episode where am adult actress is on the stand because she was raped, the controversy comes from the fact in her videos, she acts like she is being raped and the defense lawyer is trying to use that against her and have the claims dismissed. I feel like this video made the men a bit afraid to participate.

 4.)   From what I observed, Ms. Brooks heavily encourages everyone in the class to partake in the discussion. While she speaks, her eyes meet with all the students as she makes her way around the room and she prompts all us to contribute to the discussion.

 5.)   Ms. Brooks called on women a lot more than she called on men, that is not because she held any kind of bias, the women in the class were more engaged and volunteered more often. She wanted to hear input from both sides, but the men were not volunteering, it got to the point where she started to look just to the men for responses because up to that point none of the men had volunteered so she had to call on them.

I completed this fieldwork assignment in my Math class. I have this class at 8 am. Typically the people in this class are not very talkative unless they have questions, most likely since is it very early in the morning for some. On this day, in particular, there were fewer people in class than usual, about 1/4th of the class was absent.

In the class, I counted 11 women and 4 men. Overall, women tended to speak more than men did. Women spoke about a total of 8 times, whereas men in the class spoke about 3 times. Everyone regardless of gender, spoke for about 6-8 secs whenever speaking. 15-30 words spoken each time someone talked depending. Women had more words than their male counterparts when they spoke; about 10 to 15 more words than the men when speaking. Students only spoke to ask questions to the professor about a math problem. Of these people who asked these questions, 5 were women and 2 were men. The questions were about which formula to use or when to carry over a decimal amongst other math related questions.

An observation I noticed is that when the women in the class speak, their voices tended to be louder than that of the male students. Of course, this could just be a reflection of the number of women in the class versus the number of men in the class. Body language differed amongst the women and men in the class. From what I observed when asking questions the men appeared to be less enthusiastic in their tone, but also in their posture as well. The women in the class all seemed more attentive to the professor as demonstrated in their upright posture and as mentioned before, louder.

The professor always asks if there are any questions after he is finished writing on the board. While doing this the professor always makes semi-intense (in my opinion) eye contact with the students of the class. He also moves across to the opposite end of the classroom when asking this question. 

The professor's gender, in my opinion, does not seem to be influenced by his own gender. His interactions with the members of the class are more influenced by the class' demographics and seating arrangements of the students. The majority of the students in the class are women, and the majority of these women sit either in the first row or in center of the classroom.