This article is based on a qualitative study dealing with the relations between teachers' health and work in a school belonging to the public network in the city of Vitória, the capital of the State of Espirito Santo. Its aim is to map teachers' experiences of pleasure and suffering, and principally the strategies which they create to defend themselves from the harmful elements of the work environment and to produce health. It affirms the indissolubility between modes of work and modes of subjectivising and notes that the deterioration of the public system of education has produced its effects on the work of teachers, endangering their health and causing, frequently, their absence from their functions due to medical leave or even the abandoning of the profession. It seeks to give visibility to actions which suggest the need to recreate work even within adverse conditions.
production of subjectivity; prescribed and real work; health and illness