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
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