Immaersonality And Professionalism In The Classroom

In a previous chapter we went over a little about impersonality and professionalism. In one way that we present professionalism is through the way we perform social roles. According to Goffman, “We all perform many social roles in life as we enact the expected behavior associated with ‘the rights and duties attached to a given status’” (Dillon 2014: 282). An example of this is the occupations. We expect certain behaviors in certain occupations. One occasion when I encountered a confusing situation happened when I was when I first entered college.
Throughout high school I was always told that college was more structured. I imagined college professors to be stricter than most of my high school classes. The summer before my senior year, I had decided to enroll in a college class that was held at our high school. I remember this one day we were talking about slavery and early 1800s and my teacher talked about when he was younger many of the Civil Rights were going on. He talked about his experience with this
young, poor African-American boy and how it had affected him. He went on and said that the young boy’s mother couldn’t afford to buy a candy bar for her son so he had paid for it and that he had never seen someone enjoy such a small favor before and it had brought tears to his eyes. He started crying in class and I remember the students were shocked and no one knew how to react.
One thing that Dillon pointed out is that “Goffman acknowledges that performers can disrupt social roles by not playing the part their audience expects or indeed exaggerating it (as if in parody)” (2014: 283). I think that this fits my situation, because we don’t expect people to show raw emotions before an audience. I think that the teacher’s emotions made the situation confusing, because the professor’s actions didn’t conform to the social roles given to professors or in many occupations. In the feminist theories, Arlie Hochschild spoke more in depth about emotions and how we’re socialized in showing these emotions. “She (Hochschild) emphasizes that emotion is a socially structured, patterned way of feeling and of acting on feeling. We are socialized into learning how to recognize, and how and when to feel, certain emotions” (Dillon 2014: 356). Although this is a feminist theory, I feel that it could be applied to explain certain processes such as how emotions are symbolized in the symbolic theory. We learn how to recognize certain emotions by symbolism. For example, when we see someone cry we typically relate it to sadness. In addition, since we are socialized in our individualistic society that we shouldn’t display emotions, rather than to just “suck it up”; this does show how emotions are socially structured, that we know when and how to feel in certain situations, and how we are supposed to act in these situations.
Many students reacted by hiding their face and giggling, looking away from the teacher and others reacted with blank expressions. One thing that was mentioned was that “Communication is impossible without symbols and language whose meanings are shared among those in a given social setting” (as cited by Dillon 2014: 279). In my opinion, many of the students acted out of being uncomfortable. According to a study on social awkwardness, the researcher found that “Social behaviors also became expressive of awkwardness through anxious, hesitant, disjointed, or avoidant actions and such actions often became explicit targets of control” (Clegg 2012: 272-273). I feel that people may act these ways in order to hint their uncomfortable feelings to others or they don’t know how they should act within in a situation so they try to stay “calm” in a situation. However, this calmness is not being portrayed as such.
I think that many of the students acted this way because “…individuals make sense of the multiple simultaneous activities surrounding them by selecting from the reality and imposing some kind of frame on the situation” (Dillon 2014: 293). Since crying doesn’t fit the reality of being in class or in the public, the students imposed a way of understanding what was going on and how to react to this situation. Many of the students interpreted the teacher’s emotions as creating an uncomfortable environment and typically when we are uncomfortable we tend to do things, such as shake, giggle, etc. as a natural reaction. I believe that many of the students in my class did not do these actions out of inconsideration; however, they did this out of trying to provide comfort to themselves during an uncomfortable situation. Another reason I think that the students might have been acting in this way is because they were trying to show their uncomfortable feeling to the actor in order to redirect the situation.
Since many of the students didn’t know how to respond to the teachers’ emotions, we did not seek to remedy the solution.
However, we allowed the problem to seek a solution itself by waiting to be dismissed from class. We understood why the teacher was upset about his story about a young boy and some of us felt sympathy for him. However, it created awkwardness in the classroom for the rest of the class period. We were confused on how to react to the teacher’s feelings and reacted differently. I wouldn’t say that we tried to create a remedy as a class together in order for the teacher to feel better. The class seemed to avoid the situation altogether in order to create a remedy. The only solution that we could’ve came up with is that although he was our teacher and most individualistic societies don’t see crying as professional, he is still a human being with emotions. We didn’t allow his emotions during one class to affect our perceptions of him for the
semester.