I begin this writing with the aim of recounting and theorizing the worst experience I have ever
had in a classroom. As a teacher educator, I often use examples from my own experiences in
classrooms to help illustrate a point or clarify an example for my current pre-service and inservice teachers. I position my work here as practitioner research, particularly as a form of
teacher self-study (Dinkleman, 2003; Loughran, 2007). This particular story comes from the
semester I spent student teaching at a high school in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. Prairie Point
High School (PPHS) (all names appearing here have been changed) had around 2,000 students in
grades 9-12. It was located in a middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhood and at that time had
a reputation for high achieving students and poor performing sports teams. The course I was
teaching was eleventh-grade American history.
