Brooke: Underlife and Writing Instruction

I found that Brooke's argument overlapped with a few of the key ideas from Delpit's article, as well as from Elbow's article about ignoring audience. Brook argues, like Delpit, that all students feel the need to distance themselves from the classroom, to express themselves as people with interests and personalities that extend beyond the identity of "student." Current institutions, however, tend to be in conflict with the student/writer's need to express him or herself as an individual, in the same way that a teacher's desire to teach writing as a "freeing process" has gone against the "idealogical purposes of the institution" (149).

Brooke offers a suggestion to shift the identity roles in the classroom, to make students into writers in order to facilitate original thinking, as opposed to what they believe a teacher would want. He makes a good point to say that in order for writers be become good at what they do, they absolutely need to see themselves as more than just "good students," because in the real world outside the classroom, what they learned about their underlife identity is what will really matter.