Final Paper

Nicholas Perozzi

3rd Period Sociology, 7008

Anonymous High School

Mr. Salituro

My community service project was twenty-five hours in the Freshman Mentor Program here at Anonymous High. My work consisted primarily of helping students adjust from their average-sized middle schools to a comparatively giant high school. I established an environment in which the freshmen felt comfortable to not only express themselves but to connect with other freshmen they may have never imagined talking to.

It is fascinating to me how sociology makes such an impact in the classroom. From the first day of advisory, one can tell who are the introverts, extroverts, geeks, and athletes. I swear, it's something out of the Breakfast Club, every time. However, when the kids are forced (not actually forced, but "strongly encouraged") to participate and intermingle with one another, the observations can be fascinating. When a more is violated as the pretty blonde chick strikes conversation with the boy who is on his iPad in the corner all the time, when a kid tries to describe another freshman in the class without referring to the fact that he's black, or when a twin is mistaken for her sister once a week during second semester, I am grateful that I studied sociology.

A social construction of reality is how a group of people mutually agree to behave around other people over tacit communication, based on prior experience from each of the members of the group. When I did my sociology-hour-counted service in the advisory second semester, I could tell that there was a large social construction that advisory was an unwanted event. Despite good things coming out of first semester, society was telling our freshmen that they didn't want to be there. Sociological mindfulness is the way in which one feels they have an impact on the society around them. Essentially, it's each person's influence on the social construction. We told our freshmen the first day of second semester that if they go into advisory thinking they will have a good time, then they will have a good time. If they go into advisory expecting "stupid stuff" every day, then they will construct their thoughts to match up with their hypothesis. By telling the freshmen to be aware of their sociological mindfulness, we helped create a better advisory environment. During A World Of Difference, an event in which freshmen are encouraged to open up about their opinions, many of the freshmen were ready to volunteer and talk about their personal lives, a phenomenon that goes against the original social construct that advisory was a place where people sat and did nothing but complain about how they sit and do nothing.

In-groups are clusters of people who unite and often take pride in their togetherness for whatever they may stand for. Out-groups are others who do not belong in the given in-group. As an advisory, we experience in-group-bias when we convince ourselves that our door is better than all of the other doors in the door-decorating contest, even though it clearly is not. Within the advisory, out-group-bias was applied when one of the jocks of the advisory secretly accused another freshman of not being good enough to do well in life, solely because the jock was unfamiliar with this kid he did not know. These in-group and out-group attitudes within the advisory would quickly disintegrate as there was a challenge or activity that required cooperation from everybody, or a superordinate goal, as coined by Dr. Weiten in his A.P. Psychology textbook. As we learned from Tom Shadyac's documentary "I am", people tend to be more cognitively alert when they cooperate with one another than when they compete against one another.

The ideas of in-group and out-group can be closely related to ethnocentrism when talking about second semester advisory. Ethnocentrism is the love and pride for one's own in-group. The goal of my community service is to limit the culture shock, or the dissatisfying unfamiliarity with a new culture, when the freshmen leave for a new social construct as sophomores. One more, or a big social "no-no", that happened was the pretty blonde cheerleader from our advisory went over to a random freshman boy on his iPad, unprecedented, and started talking to him about their math class. Even in the year 2014 second semester advisory, in a place where we try to stress everybody accepting others equally, this still got heads to turn because it was so rare, might I say frowned upon.

Death was brought up seldom during my community service in advisory, but when it was, it was handled very gently and carefully, as death is sometimes perceived as a taboo topic to discuss. Work was brought up whenever the counselor brought up college or any sort of four-year-plan. Whenever work was the topic, all of the kids were readily attentive, as if they are all itching to work towards their success as a high school student. Love did not come up very often, but when it did, it was discrete and under the table, just as society had constructed it to be. Dependency the same story.

During A World of Difference, there was an activity I moderated in which each student would have to pick a side whether they agreed or disagreed with a given statement. These statements stretched across all lands of controversy, from gender inequality to racial inequality to sexual orientation to bullying. Nature is the innate, from-birth being that people are predestined to be. Whenever choosing upon a topic, may students would often pick the choice that reflects not the nature, but the nurture, or the conditioned influences on a person, of their being. People are nurtured by agents of socialization, or gateways of influence between the people and the social construction. People's decision whether to agree or disagree with the given statement was based off of what their agents had influenced them to pick, not necessarily what their genetics told them was right.

The only difference between males and females that I observed during my community service (I hate to call it community service, I did it because I love to do it, I swear) was that when people were distracted with technology, boys would always be on iPads, and girls would always be on their iPhones. Girls may enjoy talking to other people, so they communicate with their phones more. Boy may enjoy doing more activities or playing more games, so they play with their iPads more. Even if these hypotheses are incorrect, it's still strange that all of the boys were on their iPads, the girls, iPhones.

When the one black kid in our advisory walked up to get a Kleenex, one of my volunteer mates took the loose change on the projector and slid it into his pocket. The entire class called him out on his implicit racism, and we had a good discussion about race. As Tim Wise pointed out in his documentary "White Like Me", many people have some sort of implicit racism favoring European whites, no matter what race. I reminded the class that the one African-American is only one kid, and he does not represent all of the people of his race, so they shouldn't treat him like such. They didn't.

I enjoyed this class, Sal. Thanks for waking me up to reality. I needed it.