Both of us teach United States history in two different northern California high schools of significantly different SES/demographics, in different districts and communities about 45 miles apart. We collaborate, plan, examine, assess student work, and we tell stories about our teaching lives over the phone, in emails, and at occasional monthly meetings. Because we rarely have time in the teaching year to work in long, uninterrupted blocks of time, when we write together, we sometimes take responsibilities for different sections of a paper after thorough discussion, outlining, and diagramming. We constructed this account of an emerging pattern of response to our assignment to connect a …