Crawling in the school hallways, randomly singing in public spaces, and eating dinner with your hands.
While these are all sure-fire ways of harboring some (potentially embarrassing) attention, they are also all examples of going against social norms.
Although the early months of a school year are often filled with awkward activities meant to create more class connections and push students out of their comfort zones, Emily Paras’s AP Psychology classes are tasked with a more demanding assignment — one where they must leave their comfort zone while in public spaces, and be the only ones doing so.
“Social norms are the perceived informal, mostly unwritten, rules that define acceptable and appropriate actions within a given group or community, thus guiding human behavior,” as defined by UNICEF.
“They’re unwritten rules of society,” Paras said.
“They had to break [social norms] in public,” Paras said.“Ideally more than once. And do a short write up about how it went. So what social norm did they break? How did they feel about it? What were people’s reactions? And of course, what did they learn about social norms? So I give them a list of examples, things that they could do either here at Lane or at home or on CTA. And students usually really like it. It’s a fun one to talk about, and I’ve had people do really creative things.”
While some students have made the choice to break social norms with less chance of backlash, others have taken a bolder approach.
“I decided, if I was gonna do this assignment, why not go big?” senior Emily Sides said. “And so my friend and I decided to break the social norm of walking in the halls, and we decided to crawl.”
Besides Sides getting to make this fun and unique memory — as she described it — there are other reasons Paras has her students participate in these strange and embarrassing ventures. There are many things she hopes her students retain while actively participating in breaking social norms.
“It’s not illegal to break a social norm, but they exist because that pressure, embarrassment you feel when you break it, that’s what leads you to keep doing social norms,” Paras said. “So I hope that they learn that some social norms are not such a big deal to break. But the reason that we do that is that they’re almost self-sustaining.”
Senior Tali Degani chose to speak about herself in the 3rd person to a small group. She remarked on a shift in awareness as a result.
“I became aware of how unconsciously I follow social norms, because I hadn’t really thought about it before,” Degani said. “But when I became conscious of breaking a social norm, it made me more aware of how uncomfortable it made me, and how I was so used to following that set of rules.”
According to Paras, this assignment gets students to better understand their in-class concepts, make unique memories, reflect on societal and personal emotions and reactions, and even becomes a tool for making students more comfortable with one another.
“I think it does a lot for classroom dynamics — like I find that I overhear students talking to each other about what they did and how it went,” Paras said. “So I think it’s nice to do it at the beginning of the year because, you know, teachers are trying to get their classes to become comfortable with each other and talk to each other and make friends.”
