In this article we report a study of a teacher, Jimmy, making the transition from his university teacher education program to his first job. We explore what we characterize as tensions between traditions in his effort to develop a conception to inform his teaching of high school English. These tensions are rooted in conceptions of teaching that are typically in conflict: one stressing formal knowledge of a domain's works, conventions, and official interpretations and the other concerned with the constructive processes through which students make sense of texts. Jimmy's teacher education program, which we characterize as "structurally fragmented," did not provide him or his classmates with a unified conception of teaching; and the key settings in which he taught--his student teaching site and his first job--were infused with both traditions, leading him to exhibit the "doubleness" that Marshall et al. (1995) identified in the teachers they studied (i.e., their unacknowledged and unresolved efforts to satisfy both traditions in their teaching). The study concludes with a discussion of implications for teacher educators, particularly with respect to offering teacher education programmatically, i.e., well-articulated across coursework and conceptually strong.