Teacher education research has long understood that pre-service teachers' beliefs about teaching are well established by the time they enroll in a teacher education program. Based on the understanding that teacher memories help shape pre-service teachers' beliefs, teacher educators have sought ways to both honor such memories and facilitate a reflective dialog that analyzes those memories in light of accepted theories and methods that comprise teacher education coursework. In the updated preface to his distinctive work, "Schoolteacher" (1975; 2002), Lortie suggested that facilitating such a dialog could begin by asking pre-service teachers to write about their former teachers, thus making their memories and beliefs explicit and available for analysis. This study drew from a larger qualitative study that examined 148 preservice teachers' handwritten narrative memories about a past teacher (kindergarten through college) who, from the pre-service teacher's perspective, demonstrated excellence in the classroom and thus helped shape individual beliefs about good teaching. The narratives included memories of good teachers that spanned all grade levels, kindergarten through college, and a wide spectrum of content areas. Although they were not prompted to do so, about one in every four pre-service teachers used juxtaposition as a writing device to contrast their memories of good teachers with descriptions of poor teachers, perhaps to further demonstrate excellence through dichotomy. Data for this qualitative study were collected from 148 pre-service teacher education students enrolled in two sections of an introductory teacher education course at a research university. It was found that one in every four pre-service teachers used juxtaposition as a writing device to contrast their memories of good teachers with descriptions of poor teacher qualities. The results include 28 juxtaposed excerpts clustered into eight themes around two categories of teacher characteristics.