Identity in the classroom

I thought Brooke’s article on Underlife and Writing was an interesting read, especially because he was using terminology from a study on asylums to describe students at a university level. I thought the article tied in well with Powell’s article on Conflicting Voices since both articles deal with identity in the classroom. Where Powell’s focused more on how the professor’s identity is perceived by the students and how that affects their learning, Brooke’s articles focused more on the role and identity of the student and how that affects the professor. Powell was interested in how her race and gender influenced her student’s thoughts on her as a professor and on the classroom activities. Her article focuses on how the students perceive her whereas Brooke focuses on how students fall into identities which are products of underlife.
I found his explanations of the different ways students show fall into these underlife identities interesting but not surprising. The fact that he refers to it as a “game” is surprising and also a little frustrating. Throughout this whole course, I’ve been mulling over the communication between students and professors, or lack thereof, and trying to think of ways to incorporate the ideas that the authors of these articles that we read in order to have better communication in the classroom. The fact that Brooke calls it a game and gives examples on how students write what they think teachers want to read and tell them what they think they want to hear already frustrates me. How can we have communication between us and students, when they won’t be honest or are just out for an A?