Teachers are under a significant amount of stress and teaching has been reported to be a highly stressful profession. There is little understanding of what stress means in teachers’ lives. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the lived experience of stress as perceived by middle-school teachers from a rural Midwestern town. Data was analyzed using Moustakas’ method of analysis of phenomenological data. Individual live descriptions were organized into demands, appraisals, coping/resources, and the impact of stress. These categories derived from Transaction Theory of stress developed by Lazarus and Folkman. Teachers reported they experienced many demands. Those demands included deadlines, surveys, taking attendance, grades, emails, committee meetings, lack of administrator support, and interpersonal relationships. They appraised those demands as harm, threat or challenge. The teachers who appraised the demands as challenges were better equipped to cope. Stress affected each teacher differently. All teachers reported their stress had a negative impact on students. Increasing awareness of the impact of teacher stress should motivate the desire to reduce the demands on teachers and to design and implement programs to help teachers appraise and cope with their stress and thereby reduce the negative impact of their stress.