The Wake

I am not generally a clumsy person. I may trip over my own feet from time to time and I may have even fallen over backwards on top of a friend’s bicycle, but generally these things don’t happen to me. This day, though, I was clumsy, all for the sake of math.

A math class titled “Rate your World: Quantifying Judgments of Human Behavior” in the speech language and hearing sciences department requires every student to complete a project in which they observe human behavior and quantify data.

Not every student in the class must embarrass themselves like I did. Students had the option of doing observation surveys. A fellow classmate, Melanie McNiff, and her partner did a survey titled “Favorite Scent and Word Connotation.” For their survey they put air fresheners in bags and had people smell them, rating their preference. They then added titles to the bags, such as sexy and fierce, seeing if title created a stronger preference. “I thought it would be interested to see what smells people prefer. Scent is everywhere,” McNiff said.

The experiment my partner and I decided to do is called “The Pregnancy Drop,” although it was not originally our plan. We had originally planned on walking around with our backpacks wide open to see who would tell us, but after running two half-hour trials only one older woman told me that my backpack was open. So, with heavy hearts and a disappointment with the student population, we needed to pick a new project.

After thinking long and hard, we came up with our current project: “The Pregnancy Drop.” The goal of our project was to find out whether college students were more likely to help a pregnant woman gather her fallen things than a non-pregnant woman.

So, with this in mind, I set out with my partner to drop things for three hours. We got lucky; the weather was nice enough so that the mall was filled with people.

Dropping my stuff the first time, I was embarrassed and swore, but I persevered.

Some people stopped to help; some walked past, averting their gaze. One drop sticks out in my mind as the most shocking. I had just dropped my things in front of a male student who was talking on his cell phone. Instead of stopping and helping me, or walking around my scattered books and crayons, he stepped over my book and kept on walking.

What does this say about students today? Are we so wrapped up in ourselves that we cannot help one another? In the two seconds it took him to step over my book, he could have just as easily helped me gather my things.

Not all students were as rude, although many students did choose to ignore me kneeling on the ground, with my stuff spread all over. There were students who stopped and helped. Some said nothing as I quickly thanked them about 15 times.

After I dropped my things in front of a group of Asian business professionals, all of them stopped and surrounded me. Five of the men, dressed in business suits, stopped and knelt down with me and helped gather my things. I even received words of sympathy: “It happens to me, too,” one of the businessmen said.

A female student had stopped to help and as she handed me my things, she asked me, “Is this some sort of psychology experiment?” I quickly responded, “No, I wish, I’m just really clumsy,” and walked away smiling to myself. Someone had caught on to what I was doing—almost.

Another student, this time male, helped me gather my things and while handing me my book, he looked down and said to me, “I read this book,” in an attempt to ease the awkwardness of the situation.

Part two of the experiment involved my partner, Amanda Schiltz, to tape a colander to her stomach and attempt to look pregnant. Once Amanda impregnated herself, she would wander around campus dropping things in hopes of answering our project’s main question: were people more likely to help a pregnant woman than a regular woman.

On one drop, a male student stopped to help pregnant Amanda pick up her things. As he was handing her things over, he noticed she was pregnant and quickly seemed nervous and at a loss of what to do.

From the few drops that were made that day, it seemed that people were not inclined to help a woman who appeared to pregnant.

Could this be because of the weather? Or maybe there is an underlying feeling of hatred towards pregnant women on college campuses? Probably not, but maybe. Amanda felt that as she walked through campus with her pregnant belly, girls would look at her out of the corner of their eyes while the boys would avoid eye contact all together. A boy from math noticed her as we walked across the bridge and did a double take, obviously confused that he had never noticed this before.

So what was learned from this day? Try not to drop your things, because while embarrassing, it is also really bad for your expensive books. Also, while I would like to think that everyone would be kind enough to help you gather your things from the ground, they are not. About half of the times I dropped my things I was helped in picking them up. The other half of the time I was left alone on the ground, embarrassed.

What brought us to the point where we don’t have the time or don’t care enough to help another student? Is it because we are too plugged-in to our IPods to notice what is going on around us?

It doesn’t take long to help someone pick up their stuff, and it will most likely make their day or in my case, their project. So, let us remember the golden rule, “treat others as you would like to be treated,” and help people pick up their fallen things.