News:

Like many reform movements that first began in the nation’s schools, this one started in the nation’s language arts classrooms under the auspices of reading experts. Teacher and principals from coast to coast point to the efforts of one Lorrie McNeill as exemplary. She is a fifteen-year veteran English teacher in Atlanta’s southern suburb of Jonesboro.

Background, according to the New York Times: McNeill had grown tired of the annual ritual of force-feeding To Kill a Mockingbird down the recalcitrant throats of her seventh and eighth graders, so she decided to try a novel approach: let the students choose the texts in the class. Mind you, not a few or some of the texts—but all of them.

Once upon a time, the kids did their monthly or weekly book reports about their independent reading, but the newest wave of reading experts apparently wants to make this libertarian practice the centerpiece of language arts teaching. McNeill, still smarting from the experience of “vividly disliking The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” while in high school—she had preferred Judy Blume and Danielle Steel—decided to ditch the prescriptive medicine altogether and introduce her classes to the brave, wonderful world of freedom: in the nomenclature, the “reading workshop.”

As McNeill learned from her seventh and eighth graders, the junior high crowd is just not that into the classics.

Out: not only Harper Lee’s hoary novel of Southern race relations but also William Golding’s tale of boys gone wild, Lord of the Flies, and that memoir of growing up in Amsterdam while hiding from the Nazis, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

In (at least based on student choices): the Maximum Ride series, in which mutant half-human, half-bird creatures negotiate their way through a cruel and heartless world, and The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. Some of McNeill’s less motivated students opted for books in the comic-illustrated Captain Underpants series.

To be fair, not anything goes. One of McNeill’s mentors, the reading expert Nancie Atwell, forbids that her students read video-game-based novels, though titles from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight vampire series get the nod. And the workshop gurus, like good librarians, are busy helping their charges upgrade from one level of difficulty and quality to the next. After one of McNeill’s seventh graders read and reported on the R&B star Chaka Khan’s memoir, Chaka! Through the Fire, the teacher prodded the youth to try Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

 

Pundits knew this new development in the pursuit of student learning was bound for glory when signs started to surface of workshop mania in middle and high school history curricula. The outbreak of the workshop virus was bicoastal. Popping up in progressive school districts both in Marin County, California, and in Long Island, New York, the workshop bug reportedly jumped from its literary hosts to the fresh blood of historians during fifth-period coffee break, when members of the humanities professoriat are known to mingle promiscuously in the teachers’ lounge over their sad cups of Nescafé.

Not to be outdone by their literary colleagues either in pursuit of the watchword freedom or the maximizing of student empowerment, junior high and high school history teachers introduced the innovative concept of choose your own history in pilot programs that had the backing of grants from the Bill Gates Foundation and the Ministry of the Interior of the People’s Republic of China. Although some thought it too daring and radical in its complete sweeping away of historical movements, concepts, and details that students deemed too hard, too demanding, or too upsetting to contemplate, the workshop method soon won over its detractors with reports of glowing student evaluations of workshopped courses. Teachers who employed the workshop, letting students choose freely from a variety of texts, PowerPoint modules, and movies to develop a track of history appropriate to their own individual needs and gifts, became, in the words of one recent high school graduate, “heroes of democracy and choice.”

Gone were the days of the boring survey, the tired rehashings of the Bill or Rights, the interminable mastication of the Civil War’s causes by muscle-bound, gum-chewing volleyball coaches posing as scholars . Students enthusiastically plunged into new historical topics that carried not only full credit toward graduation but also a modicum of intellectual frisson. In one workshop-centered history program in Chicago’s North Shore, some of the most popular individualized histories that students chose to explore included “In Search of the Vampire,” “Iconic Blondes: From Madonna to Paris Hilton,” and “Finding My History, Writing My Memoir, through Jungian Analysis.” 

What had begun as a small spark in a Bank Street educator’s frontal lobe had morphed into a full-throttle blaze of pedagogical passion across disciplines. When the workshop method gained a foothold in math departments, the game was up—with traditionalists permanently on the defensive. College math departments around the country began instituting workshopped, entry-level math courses in which students could choose their own course of study in ways that flattered the individual student’s sense of achievement and self-esteem, as well as the instructor’s course evaluations. At one small liberal arts college in Ohio, in the course Excursions in Math (the professor, a graduate of Antioch and Bowling Green, admitted to an inordinate fondness for Wordsworth in spite of his math pedigree and had very nearly gone for a Ph.D. in romantic literature), students at the beginning of the semester self-assess their strengths, deciding whether they want to focus on pie-chart graphic design or on the history of the value of pi (most opting for the former) or on surfing Wikipedia for lives of the great mathematicians.