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My Project About Sociology

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Submitted By sagarrado
Words 780
Pages 4
Shannon
Sociology
11th Grade
Ms. Tahir
17th of November 2014

Breaking A Social Norm

The norm I will be violating is wearing dark sunglasses and wearing a hoodie to school (specifically in classrooms.) The norm I will be violating is nothing but a simple folkway-a rule that covers customary ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving but lack moral overtones. This norm acts as a mechanism of social control because wearing these types of clothes to a school environment show solidarity and maybe somewhat threatens people. Solidarity because you do not fully see the face of the person (hidden) and threatening because you do not know what the person is thinking and the appearance also helps in that. I will be going to specific classrooms of the day and just try to blend in with the crowd and see how people will react.

Perhaps the reactions will range from people whispering about how I look to the worst being the teacher will kick me out of class or tell me to go to the principal’s office because of my appearance. I predict that the major reaction I will be getting is someone making fun of me, which will lead to the teacher kicking me out of class.

The norm will be taking place at school, which will take place in Choir class with Mr. White and Digital Journalism class with Mr. Bondurant. In Choir class, there will be different types of people observing me. The age range will be from 14 to 17 years old, all from different upbringings and cultures. In Digital Journalism, we will have a small class of 12, most know me but they will not know why I’m doing that. The youngest being 16 and the oldest being 17 in the class.

As I entered Choir, I already felt the stares and whispers of the younger girls. When the older people of the class entered, they just gave me a thumbs-up and said I looked “cool.” So I felt a bit weird about violating the norm, because I felt out of place because of the reactions of the younger girls. But with the reactions of the older kids, I felt more confident and wanted to go on with my social experiment. What surprised me the most was Mr. White’s reaction—he didn’t have one. He never gave me a weird look; he just carried on with the class as if I wasn’t wearing the sunglasses and the hoodies. I thought the class would laugh at me, but most of the class was actually mature enough not to publicly comment on how I looked that day. Similar reactions occurred in Mr. Bondurant’s class, since most of my classmates were near my age—most of them reacted maturely and just smiled at me. Mr. Bondurant just asked if I felt like wearing sunglasses that day. I really thought that the teachers would be stricter with how I looked because I thought wearing these to school would cause distractions to the students and bother them in their studies. To be completely honest, the only difficulty I carried out in this assignment was that I felt out of place because other people were wearing regular outfits. I felt weird because I was thinking of how people might think of me, I was afraid of what they might say. Maybe it was due to the fact that I was a bit insecure of what I was wearing. None of my incidents really support my hypothesis except for the whispering conversations the younger girls had. Two students even commented how they liked the way I look and thought it looked cool. I learnt that maybe because of the way people are brought up nowadays—which is to be more open-minded they didn’t mind the way I looked. They probably thought I was going through a rough time that I felt the need to cover up as to not call out attention.

I think my experiment could also relate to an issue concerning how people dress in specific environments. In general, what I wore: a hoodie and sunglasses is a threatening form of outfit. There have been cases where school shooters wore the same outfit, which I was really surprised as to why I didn’t get sent to the front office. Although, the people might have just reacted this way because they already know who I am—so they didn’t want to waste their time to even think twice about what I wore. Either way, I was glad that I carried out this experiment because I got to observe how people looked at me just because of what I wore.

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