Summary of The Waltz of Sociability Essay - 1139 Words

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†¦In 1987/88, the year Amit-Talai conducted this research, the number of full-time students aged 15-19 in the Quebec workforce was nearing a point in which it would double the numbers recorded in 1975 (Amit-Talai 237). As the area around Royal Haven School was considered to be a â€Å"working-class district† (Amit-Talai 236) this statistic does not reflect the situation for any student body of any high school. In order to participate in social events, buy clothes, put gas in one’s car, and other activities, however; one must have some source of income. Many adolescents also used their wages in order to buy things such as books, school supplies, and other commodities â€Å"which their parents would otherwise have been hard-pressed to cover† (Amit-Talai 238). As Amit-Talai states, â€Å"the combination of full-time school and part-time work suggests that youth in an industrialized society such as Quebec, probably if anything, have less leisure time than do their counterparts in pre-industrial societies. They may even have less leisure time than their parents.† (Amit-Talai 237). Teenagers, therefore, have less free time to develop and maintain peer relationships than one would assume, granting the relationships made at the time of adolescence a much greater likelihood of