Teachers read student papers with both eager and anxious expectancy about discourse they have caused but not written. Whatever the teachers may have said about what they will look for as they read, they still measure each paper against their ideas about appropriate performances in each of the categories of textual analysis. They are not reacting to the texts as would a reader who had not instigated them. This reading process is also a physical act, insofar as the teacher both marks and writes on the text at hand while continuing to read. During this many-faceted experience, teachers who are reading are taken by many moods. Reading student writing more closely resembles the careful reading of criticism than it does reading for most other purposes. The essential difference, however, is the teacher's supratextual relation to student texts. Teachers should recognize their dualism, seeing that an internal divorce between their roles as composition teachers and literature teachers is perhaps caused by double visions they have about the proper status of a text. Such a recognition--that teachers individually experience tension and frustration when they read student writing because they hold conflicting but unarticulated values that would have them both construct and deconstruct any text--can liberate them from those very tensions. (HOD)