learned about social statuses in sociology. this essay is what happened

“Oh wow! You’re quite mature for.. your age!”

This is something I hear a lot. One social status I currently occupy, is the irreversible ascribed status of my age. I am currently 16 years, 10 months and 18 days old - and this status often disrupts my performance as a South-Asian female in an international learning setting. I skipped two grades as a child, and have since lived with both the advantages and the disadvantages of this. Upon reading this assignment’s prompt, I was confused as to how I would define a 16 year old that is in the correct grade, with age appropriate peers, as opposed to the environment I was exposed to, with peers two years older than me. With this week’s content, I was associating this thought most to Mead’s Theory of Social Behaviourism, signifying here learning to develop my self-image through interactions with the people around me. Relating this back to my performance as a 16 year old out of their ascribed stage, I thought of the impact of the people around me, realising how with older, more mature people such as my parents, teachers and family friends, that I feel most comfortable having discussions with, as opposed to my peers. On this note, this week’s prompt asks me how I perform the role of this status and I find that I aim to perform the opposite - to blur the potential for someone to peg my age and figure out that by numbers, I may still be considered an immature teen.

In considering the sociological term, impression management, I find myself defining this through the example of overthinking a contribution to a discussion, to make sure it isn’t a “dumb question” or whether whatever I’m saying will “sound smart”. I believe that this is often stemming from the standpoint that I want to manage the impression, and keep up the act of remaining an individual far more mature and in this case, older than I actually am. This draws similarities to the example provided in the Crash Course from the learning material, with the example of another student helping a daydreaming student called on by the teacher. This allows for the students to keep the image (or act) of them being studious and allows for everyone to remain as they were.

Coming back to the comfort I feel in conversing with individuals that are older than me, I originate this comfort to the fact that I am an only child that spent a lot of time with my parents. They told me that as a baby, they opted never to speak gibberish or “baby talk” to me, and instead pushed me toward speaking in words and sentences - something which may have allowed for me to begin reading as a 3 year old. This status of age against the newly found skill of reading was clashing, because as a child being placed into kindergarten, it was difficult to pay attention in a class where my peers were only just learning how to read and write their names! In moving up on the scale of education, I feel as though my age moved up with it too, with the expectation that ‘as you age, you mature’. In the same vein, I was often told in my primary school years that I could never amount to any of the work that my peers were doing, simply because I wasn’t their same age and therefore would be unable to communicate or understand the task required effectively. In reflecting on this comparison between myself and my peers, the most striking moment of skepticism of me being younger came from my 5th grade English teacher at the French primary school I attended for 8 years. My English teacher had very odd anger management issues that he would take out on whiteboard markers, doors, yelled-out cuss words, and even a flying whiteboard eraser aimed for my head (which I’d thankfully dodged) after I’d asked a question about what we were learning. After noticing this, I let my parents know of this behaviour I’d never seen before in a teacher. Upon alerting the school and discussing it with the principal, the first question asked of me by the principal was, “Are you sure he isn’t just joking? Maybe you aren’t understanding some of his humor. You are quite young.” This is one of two moments where, in applying Goffman’s theory, I needed to be front stage, portraying the appearance of a 7 year old that was trying to have the emotional strength of a 10 year old (or any older age for that matter). To me, this means that no matter what I was feeling backstage (in this case my internal emotions of anger and sadness), I needed to answer the question and make sure I could effectively prove my point with the version of myself I was portraying (frontstage). The second moment of me needing to remain frontstage and emotionally strong, was immediately after this meeting with the principal when I was back in class and my 5th grade English teacher was ‘resigning’. The last words he said to me were paired with a finger pointed directly at my face, “You will never belong here.” Front stage Shoshana was acting out a cool-headed 10 year old, and backstage Shoshana, whose emotions could show her vulnerabilities, proving to everyone how tormented she was, stayed well-put all the way backstage.

In understanding the impact backstage Shoshana could have had on this situation: completely ruining the front stage performance, proving to everyone that I was in fact not able to cope under the emotional stress, thus validating the opinion that I was too young to deal with the situation - I reminded myself that throughout growing up, people were (and still are) going to put me to the test, and this test was going to go up against both my achieved statuses, or against the ascribed status that were challenged in the example from 5th grade: ‘younger-than-my-peers’, South-Asian, girl. Since then, I have attempted not to emphasise how old I am, whether that means not getting a number put on my birthday cake, to my preference of listening to Hall and Oates rather than to Billie Eilish, to the simple example from earlier, of my participation in a discussion and not saying “the wrong thing”. I believe I portray my ascribed status of age on this metaphorical stage, by not portraying her, with my juvenile attempt to run away from who I am: a 16 year old.

P.S. I do in fact enjoy Hall and Oates, it is not a superficiality in order to hide my age. This is one of my thoughts that relates back to Mead’s theory, but this is a discussion for another day :)