Ray Fitzsimmons
Instructor: Haida Antolick
ENGL 199W: Introduction to University Writing
June 9, 2013
Assignment 2 – Summary of The Waltz of Sociability: Intimacy, Dislocation, and Friendship in a Quebec High School Vered Amit – Talai indulges her readers with a commonly accepted phenomenon of Western civilization in which adolescents rarely transition into adulthood with their childhood friends through the experiences of a group of high school students in The Waltz of Sociability: Intimacy, Dislocation, and Friendship in a Quebec High School. It is assumed that peer relationships developed during adolescence are of considerable importance but only temporary. The social and cultural ramifications of this assumption are a recurring …show more content…

For the students of Royal Haven School, on the other hand, the only point in one’s day in which one can freely socialize with his or her peers and develop some sort of social status, is at school. This “highly structured, hierarchical” (Amit-Talai 237) fraction of most teenagers’ weekdays is packed full of condensed lesson plans, assignment, tests, and various other academic coursework leaving only a small portion for student-student interactions. And even when an opportunity for conversing is in sight, an adult in a position of authority is there to say otherwise. “So long as students remained on school property, they were subject to supervision” (Amit Talai 240). Indeed, most teenagers are always being watched while at school. It seems that the staff of Royal Haven School even frowned upon the aggregation of many students in the cafeteria and would constantly move them along as soon as they were done with their meal, like sheep (Amit-Talai 240). This oppression was occurring for a good reason however, seeing as Royal Haven School had once had a “reputation for being a school with more than its fair share of violence, drugs and troublemakers “cleaned up” by a new principal who had instituted strict controls over student attendance and behavior” (Amit-Talai 240). Nevertheless, the actions of Royal Haven School’s faculty made the window of