Collegial . . .

Just spent an hour reading a colleague's portfolio - one to be submitted for a Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Teaching. It's risky to show a colleague your work, your student comments, your assignments, your teaching philosophy. What I read revealed a lot about my colleague, and I'm impressed - frankly, honored - by the trust it implies.

I wrote an entirely-too-long email responding to the portfolio, an email that'll arrive approximately 18 hours before the portfolio is due. Will my comments be of any use, especially because they're not especially analytical or diagnostic: they're mostly questions, queries, musings about the uncomfortable places in the document. What would I do with the kind of information I just gave to a colleague?