Week #3

I've been a little... lazy the past few weeks so I thought I'd get a head start on this week's blog post. Today in class we talked about Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day and how his view of conducting a sociological experiment was so different from others in his field. I think that the best part about what he was doing was the fact that doing a simple study just wasn't enough for him to get the kind of perspective he was looking for, so he tried his own way. He tried something different, and it worked.

I think that for so many people, having a one and only way of doing something works, but for me, that isn't always the case. I've always found it funny when in math class the teacher will finish going over how to do a practice problem and there's always at least one kid in the class who raises his hand and says the classic line, "I did it a different way." There's always the sideways glances and the here we go again kind of looks, and I always wonder why. The social construction of reality in our classrooms is that there is one way of doing things, the right way. I think that at least 80% of the time that is completely ridiculous. We look at the people who do things differently as being strange, as being abnormal, but if it works for them, why shouldn't they be able to use their way? Who are we to decide that the way that someone else solved a problem is wrong? Venkatesh wanted to see how the reality in the poor neighborhoods around him was constructed by the people who lived there, and how their sociological imagination was affected. In a way, by doing something radical he was able to come to a conclusion that he probably would not have come to through the course of what would be considered "normal." His abnormal approach to the people living in those areas was considered strange, but for him it worked.

Maybe we should give that kid in math class a break.