A doppelganger hangs over this issue, the teacher's teacher. I see it everywhere asking: "What are you about?" Troubling, confusing as it may be at times, it is the question that compresses the spring, gives animation to work, makes us want to know.

Toward the end of my interview with software author Neil Larson (profiled in this issue) he was speaking with great enthusiasm about how he felt Aristotle's emphasis on classification led to more knowledge and insight than Socrates' emphasis on questions.

Classifying forces one to confront the edges, he said, and at the edges insights spring up. I thought, 'Yes, . . but what makes one want to classify in the first place." We agreed it's the question. We need both, of course — the impulse and the method, the hunch and the proof.

The stories in this issue all show teachers asking what they're about. They show something more as well; they show them listening with care for the answers. "Listening," "care" create a sacred space between the question and the answer. Their held breath contains the guardian impulse that says "Wait." Together they make room for reflection before method springs up, so eager to answer. It's the quality I see it in the research into deep/surface approaches to learning.

Listen to Ference Marton answering one of my queries: "In our recent micro analyses of the learning process we have discovered that there is a brief initial phase of learning, akind of generalunderstanding of the whole of that which is to be learned. This experienced whole is necessarily very vague and undifferentiated to begin with. As you go on, the different parts derive their meaning from the sense of the whole. At the same time, the parts contribute, determining the whole in more and more differentiated, integrated and precise ways. The whole and the parts thus mutually consittute each other in the process of learning. But the whole is slightly, very slightly, preceding the parts. The reason is, ofcourse, that you can not learn anything without having an idea of what you are learning about."

The sense of the poetryin learning runs right through David Brakke's case study and the responses from Bruce Perry and Wendy Luttrell. It's the force that makes Richard Burnor dream of giving students a tool to help them think, and made Horace Rockwood broker a marriage between contending views of knowledge. Learning and teaching require many things, but none more than this faithful pause.

James Rhem