THE PET GOAT APPROACH.(The Talk of the Town)('The Pet Goat,' read by class to George W. Bush after he learned of Sept. 11 attacks, is a workbook exercise used in the Direct Instruction method of teaching developed by Siegfried Engelmann in the 1960s)

Although you do not know his name, Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann is one of the most talked-about authors in the country right now. His most prominent work, which you have not read, is a story for second graders. It begins, "A girl got a pet goat."

Engelmann's story is the one that George W. Bush was reading in a Florida classroom on the morning of September 11, 2001, at the moment he learned of the terrorist attacks. A videotape of the President holding the book open while staring blankly into space for seven minutes provides the most memorable scene in Michael Moore's movie "Fahrenheit 9/11." Engelmann has not seen the film, but when he heard about his secondhand cameo he reread his story. "I don't remember writing it," he said the other day from his office at the University of Oregon, in Eugene. That may be because it is one of more than a thousand he has written in the past thirty years.

Curious viewers of Moore's film who have tried to track down the book "My Pet Goat" have been unsuccessful, for two reasons: Moore, in his voice-over, got the title wrong--it is "The Pet Goat"--and it is not a book but an exercise in a workbook called "Reading Mastery 2." This much was sussed out last month by a resourceful blogger named Peter Smith after he studied the raw footage from the Emma E. Booker Elementary School. Noticing that the teacher repeatedly cued the class with the same precise language ("Get ready to read these words the fast way"), Smith guessed that some particular pedagogical theory was at work. That's what led him to Direct Instruction, a controversial teaching model that Engelmann developed in the nineteen-sixties.

"The whole idea is to do an efficient job with every single kid," Engelmann, who is seventy-two and is a professor of education, said. His basic principle is that if a child isn't learning it is always because the teacher is doing something to confuse him. Direct Instruction aims to eliminate that problem by introducing bite-size concepts that build directly on ones that have already been mastered, and by scripting every word of every lesson, including which words of encouragement teachers may and may not use. As the D.I. Web site puts it, "The popular valuing of teacher creativity and autonomy as high priorities must give way to a willingness to follow certain carefully prescribed ...