Dorothy and Natasha: Psychology Lab Partners

Natasha: Classroom Notes, Dorothy's Three Questions

Notes Made By Natasha After Thursday's Class

Professor Edwards began our class session by announcing that we will be assigned lab partners today for the duration of the semester. This is a four-hour college course, so the extra hour of credit is for lab work, or other research projects we might undertake, and of course we will each have a partner.

This is the second meeting of the class for the semester. On opening day he had explained that he preferred that we would not be very well acquainted with our partners, because part of the psychology projects will be to devise ways to get to know individuals better. This is supposed to be a life skills thing, not a preparatory class for pre-professional psychology majors.

During that opening day, the professor explained that he did not particularly care if we already had some hard and fast notions for lab partners. Man-wife teams, boyfriend-girlfriend teams, and so forth will be fine if that's what we really want, although he thinks we will learn more if our partners are new acquaintances.

Those who wish to do it with pre-arranged partners must have submitted their names as partnership pairs at the professor's office before this class session, though, for otherwise he will assign the pairings as he sees fit. He also said he prefers opposite gender pairings. However, opposite genders can't always be worked out, so we must do the best we can with what we get.

So, he arrived today with two lists and some stacks of cards. In lieu of calling attendance role, he read from his pairings list. Presumably, by the time he finished announcing the pairings he would have discovered any absences or extra people who may have enrolled through late registration.

I had no one in particular I wanted for a lab partner so I was willing to accept Professor's Choice and see how the course goes.

Lab partners are supposed to team up for research projects. Whatever grade the project earns will be shared by the team, for better or woe. This, of Course, encourages the partners to spend some effort getting to know each other and discovering ways to work efficiently together.

The professor called each set of names, and had each pair stand up briefly to identify each other, and later we are to meet after class to get better acquainted. The first list, of course was the people who had submitted their names for pairings. The second list carried a bit of an edge of excitement because who knows what sort of strange person you might get paired up with?

My partner turns out to be a girl named Dorothy, a second- year student, I believe; but somehow she is still housed in Whittaker Hall, the freshman women's dorm. She is rather pretty, I think, but her countenance was so overcast, you might think she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. She has long dark hair, arranged in a ponytail, and wears black-frame metal-rim glasses.

In our case, the professor got his wish, or at least part of it. We are not gender opposites, but Dorothy and I are certainly not well acquainted. The professor said that later, toward the end of this class session, he will have more to say about our partnership teams. In the meantime, we are to simply get used to the idea that we have partners and who they are.

Dorothy sat on the front row, near the middle. I think the professor assigned the seat to her because she is nearsighted. We were not sitting close to each other, but I resolved to try to remedy that by next class session.

Most of the class session was devoted to discussion of the subconscious and hypnosis. This is a good starting place, the professor said, because a key development in the history of psychology was the discovery of the subconscious levels of the mind. In fact, he said, without the subconscious, there would be no science of psychology. And without hypnosis, or its earlier names, mesmerism and animal magnetism, among others, there would have been no discovery of the subconscious.