Over the summer, I spent a week with a group of faculty at a "Boot Camp" at Colorado Mountain College in Leadville. At 10,200 feet, it was a heady experience. I'd been invited as a speaker by Ed Nuhfer, director of Teaching Effectiveness and Faculty Development at Colorado University at Denver. My job was easy. Ed had heard me say a few years back that I'd love to screen the 1948 film "Apartment for Peggy" and then lead a discussion with faculty on what it means to be a teacher, a topic this film explores with wonderful, even believable, optimism. As I said to the audience then, faculty so seldom have time or provocation to reflect on themselves in philosophical ways.

Although my part may have been, most of the work faculty did that week wasn't easy. They were asked to absorb masses of new ideas and to think hard about the very real, very practical challenges they face every day. As I sat in on these sessions, I began to wonder if encouraging them to think of themselves as part of an archetype with a long and noble history wouldn't seem a little silly, a little naive.

They take health very seriously in Colorado. Their teeth glisten like Pepsodent ads; their skin radiates a friendly relationship with the sun. I kept hearing about these morning walks people were taking before breakfast, and I was encouraged to take one. "You can't get lost; the trails all loop back around," someone said. So on the only cloudy, rainy day of the week, I set out for a 30 minute saunter. Two and a half hours later, soaked to the bone, I walked down the mountain and into a roadhouse some three miles away asking where I was. Had I "lost" time or "found" it? Had I "made" it unconsciously? I ask because on this walk many needful things happened. Lost as I was, cold and wet though I was, feeling foolish as I surely was, I relaxed. For me, this was no small thing.

Instead of the well-groomed mountain trails, I found the road to the dump. While others saw only wild flowers, I saw wildflowers and abandoned refrigerators and broken beer bottles. But as I walked along in the mud, I managed to do a lot of thinking. And a lot of it was philosophical. In my view, extreme situations demand philosophical thinking. Leisure never does. We never "find" time or "have" time for this important activity; such time is thrust upon us or we "make" it because we see the need. And so this first issue of the Forum is somewhat philosophical, because in addition to practical tips and new ideas, we need reflection, need to make time for it.

Sharon Lynch Norton's essay pursues exactly this radical idea, suggesting not just that we need time for reflection, but that our students do as well and that insisting on it may be a powerful, neglected pedagogy. Alan Altany describes the teacher in more heroic terms, but, in the end, finds the teacher's true heroism in disappearing. Samuel Thompson, in this issue's CARNEGIE CHRONICLE, writes an optimistic report based on the faculty's interest in teaching on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University. Given the right conditions (fairly easy ones to achieve) faculty seem ready not only to talk about teaching in meaningful ways, but to do serious research on it as well.

Ed Nuhfer's DEVELOPER'S DIARY bridges the philosophical and practical in stressing the importance of ethical touchstones in making day-to-day decisions in academe. Gabrielle Fletcher offers some purely practical advice on using the Internet to teach composition, and Linc. Fisch rounds out the issue with an AD REM . . . full of specific advice on forming good questions, the place where all learning begins.