"Mister, what time is it?" is an account of the evolution of a traditional teacher education program into an alternative certification program in the Arizona borderlands, outlining the theoretical frameworks that shaped the program redesign, program design elements, and challenges encountered along the way. We found many of the perennial problems of teacher education: the disconnect between schools and the university; the challenges of finding critically conscious teachers in rural schools to serve as mentors; and the difficulty of embedding teacher dispositions in observation tools (Zeichner, 2017). The redesign of the program led to two awards from the NSF Noyce program. Early-entry or teacher residency programs have been on the rise in the past two decades addressing the urgent needs of urban schools. Our work adds the rural context to this ongoing, teacher preparation reform movement (Zeichner, 2017).