Researches about high school teachers from public schools deserve more space in universities, since, in general, educational researches emphasize elementary teachers. Knowing the high school teachers implies that we can try to understand how this professional category represents its own teaching work and its challenges, from the characteristics of teaching as relational activity par excellence. The aim of our study was to analyze the perception of teaching work by teachers themselves from the dimensions of activity, status and experience, based on studies by Tardif and Lessard (2007). We start from the premise that teaching is inherently marked by the interaction that exists between students and teachers. From the point of view of methodological tools, we resort to semistructured interviews with fifteen teachers from various disciplines, two directors and one pedagogical coordinator of public school, located in the west of the city of Rio de Janeiro. We also relied on observation of everyday institution and analysis of official documents from the State Department of Education of Rio de Janeiro and from the school. Interviews with managers and the reading of the documents helped us to understand the school research institution, its actors and political contexts that exist in the State Department. In addition to Maurice Claude Tardif and Lessard, privileged interlocutors in terms of theoretical framework, we also brought to the analysis authors as Bernadette Gatti and Elba Sá Barreto, João Barroso, Rui Canário, Antonio Flavio Moreira, Leonor Torres, Michael Huberman, Andy Hargreaves, Françoise Lantheaume, Maurice Tardif, among others. With this research, it was revealed that teachers have a series of images about their activity, status and experience that help set the scene of teaching today at a state public school. Moreover, it allows a greater understanding of what is happening in middle school at that institution. The interactivity between students and teachers is a constant in the work of teachers, as well as is perceived a relative autonomy of teachers against the culture of performativity, which requires the following standards and achieving results in high school.