ABSTRACT
This chapter examines identification by academic performance, shyness and personal attractiveness. The classroom situation may be suitable for a particular form of academic performance at one moment and unsuitable for it at another. A grade eight teacher who was conducting a geometry lesson on circles suddenly found herself repeating an earlier discussion of plane angles and figures, as a result of a question from one of the class. The classroom situation may be suitable for a particular form of academic performance at one moment and unsuitable for any form of it in the next. The chapter presents a set of testable hypotheses generated from field data pertaining to the ways Newfoundland and Jamaican teachers define academic performance situations in their classrooms. Suitable academic performances initiated by the teacher have their own justifications. For the most part teachers in urban Jamaica and urban Newfoundland appear to define classroom academic performance situations in the same ways.
