“You get worn right down,” a teacher in Berkeley said. “You don't get very much support.” Fresh faces appear in classrooms with every new school year, new promises, new lives, new needs. The work of teaching proceeds minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, a slow, steady accretion of facts, skills, techniques, details, the responses sometimes grudging, sometimes enthusiastic, the rewards uncertain. “Teaching is like housework,” another teacher said. “It's never noticed until it's not done properly.”

Although these teachers undoubtedly speak for many of their peers, no teacher is typical; each survives and flourishes in distinct ways. A small-town elementary school teacher may treat her students as her own. They are members of a community to which she belongs. Often she has grown up either in or near the town. Her anxieties turn on the effects of classroom conditions upon her ability to love and guide her charges. A teacher in a larger urban community questions whether she can do anything to overcome the learning and behavioral problems that confront her. Poverty, unemployment, and racial discrimination set the terms of her interaction with students. She talks openly of their effect on her classrooms. A suburban teacher tries to impart the subject matter of her curriculum to students while meeting the demands of new agendas: drug education, alcohol education, sex education. The new agendas are part of a process whereby schools have become agencies for solving social problems.