Discouraged/disappointed With Portrait Class

Kind of a vent/see if anyone else has had similar experiences post.

Been taking a portrait class the past two weeks and have two weeks left. The instructor is a super talented photographer that has a whole well of knowledge, but I left the class tonight feeling more discouraged than when I started and it's not because of my photos.

I've self taught myself a lot of things like carpentry/building, hardscaping/landscaping, and flame work (bench torch blowing glass) and I've gotten myself pretty comfortable with how my camera operates, exposure triangle, adjusting settings on the fly, etc. The basics.

I took this four class course to get a better feel for portrait taking. The first class was a decent overview and then about 20% about taking about "talking to a customer to build a rapport and familiarity". This last class was 80% on the whole talking to a customer thing and when we finally got to the point of taking pictures it was expected we do a role play as "photographer and customer" before taking pictures of them. The whole thing just felt cringy to me and pretty uncomfortable which when was finally my turn to take photos by the time I got to shooting it just felt ridiculously flustering and on the spot. Like acting like a photographer was more important than learning and taking time to really take in what we were trying to do and learn in a meaningful way.

We have two more classes and supposedly have models coming for the next two. My concern is this continuation of acting like a photographer overshadows actually learning portrait photography. Like I'm not a freaking professional photographer and I'm not going to look like an idiot pretending to be for a bunch of strangers. I just want to play with lighting, some poses, and practice actually taking portraits.

Anyone else ran into something like this?