This article addresses the importance of highlighting teachers' emotional labor within teacher education programs. Given the changing landscape of schools in the 21st century, teachers' emotional labor now includes participating in annual safety drills and lockdown trainings, in addition to responses to violence (threatened or actual). This study emerges out of a need to explore how this national context shapes teacher candidates' identity development and to consider how teacher education programs might better address this context. Employing Berry's (2007) framework of tensions within teaching practice, the paper offers a discourse analysis of a reflective journal entry written by a teacher candidate in response to the 2017 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Arguing for the use of narrative inquiry within field experiences, the authors propose that teacher educators can help candidates develop more responsive and productive emotional practices by linking emotions to roles and relationships, using negative emotions to articulate purposes for teaching, and highlighting the emotional practices of experienced teachers.