ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the feelings about teachers that the US standards movement evokes and the affects this movement captures, flows within, and amplifies. It explains school reform agendas as "machines for generating affect" that contribute to public feelings about education. The chapter argues that the animus congealed teachers within what Arun Saldanha calls a viscosity, "bodies gradually becoming sticky and clustering into aggregates", and that this positioned teachers as separate from and at odds with "the public". It offers Saldanha's notion of viscosity as a useful figuration for thinking through the space-time-matterings of education since it is both a "spatial and temporal event". The chapter addresses following questions: What affects towards teachers and teaching are mobilized in reports, legislation, and media coverage? How do these feelings aggregate bodies into particular collectivities with varying social and political effects? and How do the viscosities forming around teachers get "hooks" into the social flesh, reworking its dimensions and divisions?.
