There are two kinds of drama that is normally associated with high school: the "drama" that accompanies social life in late adolescence and the dramas that are performed in a school's auditorium or performing arts center. The drama about which the author writes about in this article is of a different sort altogether. It is, however, like the first, social in nature and, like the second, a matter of playing roles/wearing masks. The author has found, through recent participatory action research with his own and other schools' students, that a greatly under-acknowledged and under-theorized­ educational issue is how students engage their curricular content insincerely, behind a façade or through a "persona," all the while giving the appearance of engaging meaningfully and in good faith. It turns out that more students than one might think adopt masks. It also turns out that a student's decision to either adopt a "persona" or be his or her true self is tied to the relational nature of a teacher's pedagogy. Through journal writing the author devised an ethnographic project to understand the effects of personalized teacher responses on student journal entries.