Transcendentalism was a pivotal movement in American history. Poets such as Emerson and Thoreau showed the world a new idea of individuality matched with interconnectedness. I have always believed that individuality was a key piece of society. The way that we separate ourselves from others is what leads us down different paths. When we are young, many of us are told that we are special no matter what we do or say. We are taught that different is better. I decided to conduct an experiment that would directly connect to the transcendentalist ideals of non-conformity and individualism. My high school, St Charles East, seemed like a good place to carry out the experiment as it was a small population of teenagers that always worried about …show more content…
At the beginning of every class period I would quickly write down my findings from the passing period and the record all of my compiled data electronically at night. After a few days it seemed routine to record my observations, and my records became more clear as I started to understand what I was looking for. As I went on, I sometimes had to adjust my procedures a bit. For example, sometimes the crowds in the halls were just too dense to even attempt to go against the flow. I recorded these times and places and would therefore every day try and get further left, but usually I had to let go of my goal for a minute to get to …show more content…
Every day of the study, in dense hallways or busy passing periods, I was told to get out of the way or one of several other negative remarks. As I tried to walk on the left, I was met with a heavy feeling of annoyance from the other students. It was sometimes surprising to see the amount of anger some people could muster from a single student on the opposite side of the hallway. This was probably the most exciting evidence I had compiled, and the evidence that I thought helped my study the