In this paper, the 2019 Polish Teachers Strike (PTS), joined by 75 percent of all public schools and kindergartens for over three weeks, gives rise to an investigation in teacher professionalism that is grounded in local activism. Reading the Polish Teacher Strike (PTS) as a moment of social upheaval (Buchowski, 2017), I claim that the strike deserves anthropological attention to explore its context and meaning for larger socio-political developments at stake. I offer a deeply contextualized reading of the PTS from two angles. First, I analyze the strike under a framework of teacher professionalism that draws on the works of Judyth Sachs (2000; 2016), Solvi Mausethagen and Lise Granlund (2012) to incorporate a locally-grounded understanding of meaningful teacher engagement in social change. Second, I offer an interpretation of the PTS as an act of resistance against performativity measures as part of a number of policy technologies that teachers have been subjected to since 2017 (Ball, 2003), on the one hand, and the notion of the performative as a vital practice in democratic societies (Matynia, 2009a; 2009b) on the other hand.