Constance. I felt that I was in the way of everybody.... Like that whole 
school did not appreciate that I was there... 
C.M. 
Could you be specific? 
Constance. I only got to teach the whole class about maybe four times [this 
out of a total of eight weeks of practice teaching in a Merrytown school). You know she is very sweet and I like her (the cooperating teacher). But she didn't give enough room. ..and she couldn't. She had all these things to do. I didn't get to do science and math at all and I felt like I was hesitant to do things that were very different from her way. 
Students enrolled in pre-service teacher education programmes often express dissatisfaction with the quality of their preparation for teaching, paranoia over their own abilities, and often a low rating of their own prospective profession vis-à-vis other occupations. The literature on teacher education is replete with references to the phenomenon of student teacher "disgruntlement” (Lortie [22], Fuller [8], Gibson [9], Tabachnick et al. [32], Zeichner [38]). Gibson [9], for instance, describes student teachers as perceiving their pre-service experience as practice teaching "under duress” In what follows, I will describe and draw some conclusions from a semester long field study I undertook with 16 student teachers (all women) enrolled in the junior practicum 300 in the teacher education programme at a large mid western university in the United States. In my study this university will be referred to as Merry Hill U. The students at Merry Hill also expressed disgruntlement and dissatisfaction with their pre-service programme. What my study shows is that these apparently random instances of disgruntlement are indicative of a far more systematic clash of student perspectives and common sense experiences with the agenda of Merry Hill U's programme, which emphasizes "critical” and “reflective” teaching.