John Keats--in one of those wonderful long letters remembered with almost as much pleasure as his famous odes--wrote this: "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination." What we feel, what we conceive of and come to believe, has tremendous power, and like most power, the power of caring and belief can prove constructive or destructive depending on what we carry in our heart's imaginings. Perhaps for some readers talk of Keats and "the heart's imaginings" will seem too much, too removed from logic to be anything but sentimental and thus worthless. But how do we explain the relentless findings of Robert Rosenthal and his colleagues about the "Pygmalion phenomenon" except by admitting the power of our beliefs about our students? If teaching largely consists in shoveling facts down the coal chute of time, that's one thing. If it's something more, something perhaps a bit sacred because it attends to human freedom and human betterment, that's something else. Rosenthal remains the scientist, refusing to make inferences about causes his data cannot support, but as a teacher he sees one clear moral implication in his data: If a teacher doesn't believe in a student's capacity to learn, he shouldn't be that student's teacher.

Connecting with students, remembering always how a teacher's obligations go well beyond knowing the facts and being well-organized, forms the theme for many of the offerings in this issue of the Forum. What prospective job candidates think about teaching and what students think of their teaching matters a great deal in faculty hiring at Evergreen State College. Robert Knapp shares the interview questions from last year's hiring cycle and describes Evergreen's version of the teaching colloquium.

Laura Border's DEVELOPER'S DIARY contrasts a well-read professor deeply involved with his material, with one of the best of today's new teachers, equally well-prepared, but connecting more fully with her students.

Steve Grineski of Moorhead State University records the experiences of five faculty members who visited classes not as faculty, but as students. From the students' point of view (informed by their lives as faculty), they offer observations on what it would take to make teaching more effective.

Richard Ashford of the Bush Faculty Development Program at the University of Minnesota briefly describes how soliciting and studying positive student comments on teaching offers a rich source of data for improving teaching as well as a lot of reinforcement and motivation for good teachers. And following up on Ashford's study, we report on what chemical engineer Paul Amyotte is doing at Dalhousie University and what James Greenberg is doing at the University of Maryland to capture and learn from "student voices."

Whom should we listen to? Recall that Pygmalion supposedly hated women, even as he sculpted a vision of a perfect one. A god entered and made his dream flesh and his misogyny melted away. Should we wait upon a god to enter and improve our teaching, present us with our conception of perfect students? Daily, we are sculpting what we dream of. Professors profess a faith that can't be hidden; perhaps our doubts can't be hidden either. The call to believe not in our facts, not in our fields or our areas of expertise, but in our students and in their capacities to explore, enjoy and take care of the world as well or better than we have: that's the challenge of teaching. It does not require us to become uncritical smiley-faced optimists, but does demand that we believe in our students and in the extraordinary miracle of ordinary learning.