As I said in my first post, I live in a strange place as far as culture is concerned. Not that I dislike my town of residence by any means – in fact I rather enjoy it – I just find it to be a sociologist’s playground considering how many lifestyles and schemas I have to integrate into my teaching considerations. Today was a classic example of the level of stark differences among my students in terms of social understanding and social conformity.

Solomon Asch did an experiment once in which a group of people were put in a room and asked a plethora of questions that you might find on your standard ACT test nowadays (see the example of a question at the right – in this question subjects were asked which of the lines on the right is closest in length to the line on the left). The subjects were told to go around in a circle and answer the questions aloud so the observers could record the answers. Among the main group there was a group of individuals who were staged as “participants” in the study but who were really “insiders”. These individuals were told to get a few correct and then start providing incorrect answers to questions that were relatively easy. The group of “insiders” were placed ahead of the other participants in the vocal response order, so the experimental group could hear them all giving an incorrect answer very confidently.

The point of this is that almost a third of the non-insider participants answered incorrectly on any given question during the experiment. During a control experiment a maximum of 3% of participants answered incorrectly on any given question. Social conformity, the indirect result of a phenomenon called normative influence, is prevalent in society on all levels and presents itself in intriguing ways within the secondary school.

In three classes today we discussed nobles and dukes within the system of feudalism. The basic description of these people included the line “large land owners” on the PowerPoint. This eventually led to a discussion about how I had recently moved (I love tangents that give kids a brain breather). In three separate classes with three separate personalities these were the resulting attitudes:

Class 1 (predominantly African-Americans): “Did you move closer to your family?” And a subsequent tangent on how many cousins each child lives next to.

Class 2 (predominantly rural farmer’s children): “How much land do you have now?” And a subsequent discussion on their family’s farm sizes.

Class 3 (predominantly higher-scoring standardized test takers of mixed ethnicity): “Did you buy a house?” And a subsequent discussion on property taxes and other things no high-schooler should really worry about.

Why do I teach? Because every day is different. And because every class period is educated in a different way. That’s what makes teaching both a challenge and a pleasure: I can influence these kids to think in different ways. Perhaps they can think about things like the class before them does. Wouldn’t that be a challenge?