Sheep-like behavior at school

Lots of funny social observations happening at Santa Monica College this week!  I’ll share one…

I wanted to add a Biology class that was supposed to start at 12:45pm. I found the door to it around 12:30.

There were a couple people just hanging out right in front of the door, as if the door was locked and they were waiting for the professor to come open the door.

I was a bit early and decided to go a bit further away, so I could be in the open air and under the beautiful, light drizzle at the time.  The air felt really nice to breathe.  And I still had a line of sight to the classroom entrance.

As the minutes rolled by, more and more people started arriving to hang out in front of the door.

So 12:45 arrived with no sign of the professor still.  And I’m just staring at these people who are all just quietly standing around and staring at the door.

At around 12:50, five minutes late, the door to the class SUDDENLY swung open from INSIDE!

Guess who! It’s the professor! And in the room, I could see there’s dozens of people already seated inside for all this time.

The professor yells out, “Ah! I thought I was gonna get to add a lot of people!”

And everybody really close to him looked somewhat stupefied that they COULD HAVE JUST GONE IN and they were waiting for no reason and everybody just started to swarm inside.

I think this qualifies as sheep-like behavior.  Nobody tried to open the door.  And early on, when there were just a few people, nobody tried to strike up a conversation or question what was going on.  Instead they just assumed everything, just like I did!

I’m not saying these people are stupid.  Maybe a BIT meekish. I mean after all, *I* didn’t go and try to open the door either.  I chose to just enjoy my fresh air for as long as possible.  Maybe they were all thinking the same thing as me, right?

Either way, this sort of group-think seems to happen very often at school!  Maybe it’s just because they are mostly young adolescents and somewhat afraid to come forward and say what’s on their minds or to speak up.  I’m not sure what’s going on but god damn it’s really fun to watch.

Do you see this sort of behavior at your school as well?

Antranik