Mr. Carpenter prompts. The students shout out in unison. No, the wolves only howled at night. Similar chanting is also audible from classrooms down the hall. A Return to the Basics After five more such exercises, the class moves on to the next task in its language arts textbook, which is to identify the parts of speech in a series of sentences.
Fingers snap, students shout.
So the lessons go. Except for one hour-long period, Mr. Carpenter uses Direct Instruction all day long. The least structured of those classes is U.S. history, when students get a chance to ask as well as answer questions and to write the kinds of longer reports and essays not included in the fast-moving writing classes. In the history class, they are asked, for example, to draw connections between the Magna Carta and protests over the stamp tax in Colonial America, and they ponder what life in the United States would be like if President Clinton were king. And this teacher and his students say it's their favorite subject.