Homework = Watching TV!

This is my second week of the class Communication and Collaboration in the Early Childhood Field. My assignment this week was to watch an episode of a TV show that I do not normally watch but without sound. During the episode I made predictions about the characters’ relationships based on how they were communicating. Then I watched the episode with sound to see in what ways I was and was not correct.

I chose to watch an episode of “The Millers” which is a show I had never heard of before. The show started off with two men talking together in a coffee shop and watching a yoga class that was going on in the next room. One man begins smiling and waving to a young woman in the yoga class and soon they are waving and making faces at each other. Soon the class ends and the young woman and an older woman leave the class talking. The men walk over to them and suddenly the young woman looks upset at the man she was smiling at and immediately leaves the coffee shop.

As I watched I assumed that the two men were friends and the man who was smiling at the young woman was the son of the older woman. It seemed like both of the men were single because they were focusing on a few different women throughout the episode. They would flirt with the women by smiling at them from a distance and then approach the woman and talk very close to them.

During one part of the episode the mother was at a doctor’s office. She was telling something to the receptionist and the receptionist looked like she was feeling sorry for the mother because she had a concerned look on her face and at one point put her hand on her heart.

After I watched the episode with sound, I discovered that I was correct about a few things and incorrect about others. I was correct about the relationships between the characters. I was able to tell their roles and relationships because of their nonverbal behaviors including eye contact, facial expressions, proximity to each other and hand gestures.

If this were a show I was familiar with I would’ve had some past knowledge about how each of the characters’ personalities. Watching a new show without sound I made assumptions that were not always correct. This translates into the real world too because it’s important to not rely solely on assumptions without sufficient information.