Week 1 Tute: Know thyself first

The first Tute, because before you can read a room, you need a working read on your own baseline

22 February 2027

Every method in this course asks you to watch a room and notice what’s happening in it. That’s harder than it sounds if you don’t already know your own baseline: what your attention does when you’re tired, what your body does when a room gets tense, how much of your own signalling to other people you’re not even aware of. Week 1 is entirely about you, because everything after this week is about you watching everyone else.

Before the session#

Carry a small notebook or your phone’s notes app for one full day. Every time you notice your own attention snap toward something, or your mood shift, jot down the time, the trigger, and what you did about it. The log template is the format the rest of the semester’s field tasks will assume. You are not analysing anything yet, just building a log.

In the session#

We go through a handful of logs anonymously and sort the entries into categories: attention triggers, tension signals, recovery moves. You’ll leave with a short, personal vocabulary for your own baseline state that the rest of the semester’s field tasks will lean on.

Afterwards#

Keep the log. You’ll want it in Week 12, when the course comes back around to what your own baseline has to do with resolving a conflict calmly.

Why this comes before anything else#

Almost every framework later in the semester (Goffman’s civil inattention, Hall’s proxemics, Oldenburg’s third place, all glossed on the readings page as they come up) asks you to notice something about other people’s state. That’s a much harder read to get right while your own attention is scattered or your own tension is masking itself as irritation at someone else. A baseline log doesn’t fix that on its own, but it makes the gap visible, which is the first thing you can actually work with.