The relation of the private life to the public is perplexing when thinking about the role of the public and private in public schooling, particularly as students learn to distinguish and navigate the private and public space of school. Learning to attend to the nuances between private and public and encountering documents that indicate such distinctions exist, such as student conduct codes, sets teachers up for a particular set of expectations when engaging in classroom discourse or other deliberative actions. Learning what constitutes the "privateness" or "publicness" of something is both an outcome and a process of learning the very conception of "what" is the private and "what" is the public. This Deweyan insight presents specific problems to schools and teachers. In this article, the author explores factors that impact teachers' mediation of the private and public within the classroom: ideological separation, confrontational staging, and "enactedness." Ideological separation presents the notion of being able to distinguish publicness and privateness based on the perceived capacity to ideologically separate private and public without overlap. Confrontational staging suggests that by ascribing to ideological separation, the classroom forces teachers to unexpectedly confront the clash of the publicness and privateness of students' lives within the classroom at any moment. Lastly, leveled implications or "enactedness" addresses the conflict between separating out the private and public on paper versus when distinguishing between the two is enacted in a particular classroom context in the moment.