ABSTRACT
Success stories get told as a good number of students graduate and enter the more satisfying sectors of the working class, and teachers do find work by their students that they can display proudly. A culture is best analyzed in the detail of the dramas it organizes. Reproduction in large groups and over long periods of time has been well documented. It is the stuff of general sociology. This chapter highlights the rhetorical ways through which the classroom project is constructed as something controlled by the teacher in charge. It also highlights how students can deconstruct such projects by playing on the properties of the rhetorical pattern. The chapter explains the exact process of such construction and deconstruction during the taped half-hour. It shows how such local performances get replaced within less local ones in the context of West Side High as an alternative school of the New York City board of (American) education.
