The Eureka moments of Archimedes in the bathtub and Paul on the road to Damascus undoubtedly have greater importance than the golden afternoon twenty years ago when I first experienced the power of team teaching. I was a TA. My old college roommate, then a TA at Vanderbilt, was visiting. I was teaching Huck Finn. Green in every way, I was playing 'the teacher'; I was getting nowhere though I was trying hard. The students were green; they were playing 'the students.' And then, my roommate, who never let the glunky theater of teaching overpower his devotion to, passion for, and interest in "the text," asked a question.

Instantly, we were ourselves, talking about literature just as we'd done hour after hour only a few years before. We were old friends engaged in a real conversation about something we took seriously. We brought our knowledge to the table, our civility, our love for each other. In that same instant, I am convinced beyond argument that everything else in that room shifted as well. The ethos changed. We all dropped our masks and sat together comfortably naked in the role of learners.

With this story as background, you can understand my excitement at finding EPD 160 in my own backyard. Subscribers will find extensive supplemental materials about this course posted on the Forum's Web site. These include statements of philosophy, orientation materials for new faculty, and a comprehensive, outside study of the course in operation conducted by the UW's LEAD Center. In addition, we have posted a section from Jim Davis's new book on team teaching, a section for faculty that focuses on getting started if you've never thought of trying this unbelievably vital mode of teaching.

When John Frohnmayer was fired as Chairman of the NEA in 1992, he felt the shadow side of not being regarded as "a team player." He took a stand for artistic freedom, and paid the price conviction often exacts. Teaching is a complex business and it takes place in a variety of contexts simultaneously. Each context imports difficult, value-laden questions which often call for the integrity of individual decision and action. Pairing Frohnmayer's wide-ranging appraisal of the necessity of individual conscience with stories about team teaching clarifies an important point higher education needs to bear very much in mind these days: collaboration and cooperation do not imply "group think." They offer a refreshed experience of freedom. Solitude can be a fine thing; isolation, less so. Too many faculty teach in isolation from their peers, never entertaining the thought that they might be able to teach differently and better if they were not so alone, perhaps oppressed, in their work.

We are never alone in teaching. As Toni McNaron points out, new teachers stand in the wings waiting to take our places. Her essay--originally a keynote address at the recent TA Conference in Minneapolis--offers sensible suggestions for preparing these future professors for the work ahead. Ironically, her suggestions would also help us learn more about the work at hand. We grow older; students, younger. TAs can help bring us closer to our students if we'll let them.

How to reach them? How to reach students of all kinds? Laura Border's "Developer's Diary" suggests it's time we admitted that "learning styles" parallel different affective postures. It may seem convenient to view these basic ways of looking at the world as mere cognitive quirks, but the differences go deeper. How we see the world is how we feel about it. To teach is to change lives only because thinking and feeling live side by side.

Ted Rachofsky ends this issue in the place where learning begins: with the question. Rachofsky reminds us that if it takes courage to teach, it takes courage to learn, and admitting you don't know is the first brave step.