It is typically understood that friendship is define as "a close and informal relationship of mutual trust and intimacy" (Oxford English Dictionary). On a basic level, friends care about each other. They spend time interacting in ways that are mutually beneficial. Friendships usually take a period of time to develop--people typically do not speak of having a friendship with a person without a series of enjoyable experiences with them; friendships emerge and are maintained by continued mutual experience and affection. However, friendship makes things tricky. When it starts to creep into the ways teachers see students and the ways they see them, it can undermine authority and, at worst, lead to scandal. Nevertheless, friendship may be of especial use in the current moment. In an era in which scholars across the spectrum of education research have decried ways schooling has become increasingly tied to measurement of knowledge through reductive assessments (e.g., Giroux, 2011; Labaree, 2010), teaching and learning has become less human(e) (Grumet & Pinar, 2014; Paris & Winn, 2013). This essay theorizes that friendship might point to ways out of or around this dehumanizing trajectory, able to do different things because of a relation that suggests teacher and student might engage with (and learn to like) the person in front of them, and worry about the testable later, if at all.