Arrival stories are said to be typical components of anthropologically informed ethnographies in which the ethnographer as "stranger" comes face to face with research subjects as "others", establishes a context for the research and perhaps uses the story to justify the validity of his or her observations. The notion of a conventional ethnographic arrival is critiqued from the position of teacher-ethnographer, revealing a less conventional sense of arrival and a text relying more on reflexive ethnographic practice. After briefly considering arrival stories in ethnographic studies of schooling, those illustrating modernist epistemological tendencies are compared to more recent attempts to write a more reflexive sense of arrival. The trope of the arrival story is illustrated with reference to the author's arrival as a teacher-researcher at a school where research for this paper was carried out, and to the arrival of a student. Arrival is shown to be far more than an innocent physical activity but one that is accompanied by a range of emotions as both researcher and student confront their subjectivation. In the case of the student, the process of getting to school and arriving reveals some of the intensity with which his subjectivation is contested and throws light on what it is to be regarded as disaffected with one's schooling. (Contains 16 notes.)