When it comes to beliefs, attitudes, and values, as humans we may all be defined as much by contradictions as by consistencies. Everyday experience is enough to confirm this observation and, in fact, to give it the status of a truism. How it plays out for English teachers as they discuss their students' engagement with and achievement in literacy is the focus of this chapter. This chapter is about a group of secondary English teachers at the cutting edge of classroom practice, and about their holding of sometimes contradictory theories about engagement and achievement that get played out in their classrooms as part of writing and literature instruction. Rather than view such contradiction as problematic, I see it as ordinary and necessary in the dialogue forged of everyday classroom experience. Similar to essayist Adam Gopnik, cited at the opening of this chapter, I argue that teachers' shifting theories reveal the multiple and sometimes conflicting realities of their dialogic existence in the world of school or, put another way, their shifting identities as they relate to one another, to students inside the classroom, and to outside others, such as policy makers, who influence classroom life.