Mony-9/15 After Class...

I was a cross country runner for four years in high school, long before I started smoking, drank coffee, or read the newspaper. Believe it or not, I liked to run, but mostly though because it kept me thin and pretty...come on I was 14 and wanted to look like Winona Ryder.Everyday our team would practice for 3 hours. Practice involved our coach telling us to stretch our legs by bending over and touching our toes, he told us how many laps to run around the track, and finally he reminded us to drink plenty of water. That was about as indepth as he ever got, and amusingly, we thought he was the most amazing coach. Actually, the state of Florida did too; they voted him Coach of the Year. Looking back, I realize that he didn’t do anything particularly revolutionary in running, he really just watched us run around the track a dozen times a day and yell out our split times to us, even though we all had watches on. This is a perfect example of Habermas’ disciplinary specialties theory. My coach became separated from the non-running public by becoming a “running expert”. The Orlando Sentinel even photographed him holding a golden running shoe and stopwatch. His expertise was based on the fact that he formed able-bodied and active teenagers into “runners”. Hmm… were we not able to run before him?

Master status is a concept that I learned about in a sociology class that is very similar to the disciplinary specialties concept. This term basically describes when a person’s main character trait over shadows all other traits in their life, for example: doctors, coaches, and lawyers. They are no loner John or Jill, for they have added their disciplinary specialty to their name, they are Dr. John and Coach Jill. They are now experts, and society will call them this by name. They have lost all other aspects connected to their existence. They have become a walking billboard for their profession.