I am currently right in the middle of a book called Looking for Alaska by John Green. The book is about a boy who decides to leave his boring school in Florida behind and go to a boarding school. Lots of interesting things happen to him, and many of them are as a result of the rivalry between the “in” crowd and the “out” crowd. The in crowd is the segment of the school that is rich kids. The kids in the out crowd all hang out with each other (this boarding school is small) and, for the most part, avoid the in crowd kids. Still, they consider themselves less popular because… well there isn’t really a reason. This got me thinking. The kids in the “out crowd don’t want to hang out with the in crowd and vice versa. Why should one group be considered more popular? What is this popularity based on? The in crowd kids don’t have more friends or better grades, or nicer faces. I guess it could be because they have more money.
This got me thinking about our school. We have popular people. I started thinking about why they are popular. I couldn’t find a reason that made sense. Some people are popular because they know people that are popular. But then why was that first person popular? I am entirely confused by this.
When I was in 6th grade, I first started to discover that there were popular people in our school. I think my friends pointed the people who were popular out to me. Then I knew they were popular, and I started to realize that everyone else did to. That was my first real life encounter with the idea of popular people. What I think is weird is that I never stopped to wonder why these people were popular.
After a lot of thinking on the issue I believe I have a theory. We expect there to be popular people, so we start to look for who is going to be popular. Then people start to subconsciously decide who they think is popular, then they tell other people, who tell other people ect. All of the sudden, we have a group of popular people. Unfortunately this is just a theory, and while it makes sense in our school, it doesn’t really make sense in Looking for Alaska. I usually like to end my blog posts with some sort of answer to whatever question I posed in the beginning of the post, but this time I really don’t have an answer. If you want to tell me your thoughts in a comment that is great because right now, my only answer for why people are popular is, they just are.
Miranda! Hello there. I know this post isn't exactly too old, but I thoroughly enjoy it. It makes me think. Anyways, here are a few things to improve:
ReplyDeleteUno: Try to organize your ideas just a but better. I found myself totally confused a few times.
2: Try to develop on your theory about popular kids. Make it solid. From a science standpoint, form a thesis and a concluding statement.
three: Add a few more connections to the book, just to reiterate your points.
fo: Try not to ask so many questions. A few are good, as they let you ponder the subject, but too many just made me confused and my mind started wandering and going off on crazy tangents. Then I just have to read the whole blog again. And over and over and over.