"The Pet Goat" (often erroneously called "My Pet Goat") is a children's story and classroom reading exercise written by American educationalist Siegfried Engelmann. It was published in a 1994 basal reader. The story, about a girl's pet goat who has a habit of eating objects, is designed to teach students about words with the letter E.
The story is notable for being read by U.S. president George W. Bush at a school in Florida during the September 11 attacks (9/11) in 2001. While he read it and listened to a classroom of children read it aloud, he was discreetly informed of the crash of United Airlines Flight 175 in New York City—which confirmed that the prior crash of American Airlines Flight 11 in the city was deliberate. Bush quietly waited seven minutes for the students to finish before responding to the unfolding crisis. His wait has gained notoriety in the retrospective assessment of his response to 9/11.
Story
"The Pet Goat", a children's story, was written as a grade-school-level classroom reading exercise by Siegfried Engelmann. It was included in the basal reader Reading Mastery: Rainbow Edition, Level 2, Storybook 1. It was written in accordance with the Direct Instruction (DI) teaching method. Engelmann and other educationalists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the 1960s developed the method, which is to teach a fact to students by directly demonstrating it, instead of stating it in the abstract; DI's underlying philosophy is that students most easily understand and quickly memorize a fact this way. Starting in the 1970s, Engelmann composed more than a thousand reading exercises that used DI.
"The Pet Goat" was designed to teach students about words with the letter E—mostly how inserting an E into one of two otherwise identical words gives them separate meanings, such as with cans and canes. and is the third-highest grossing documentary film of all time. In an early scene, a seven-minute video of Bush listening to the "Pet Goat" reading plays in its entirety, as Moore presents the moment as Bush faltering in the face of a crisis.
Views on Bush's wait
Many of Bush's supporters responded to Fahrenheit 9/11 by arguing that there was nothing for him to do but wait for more information, as to not alarm the students. In it, he implies that the wait helped the hijackers who were still alive to carry out their plan.
In actuality, American Airlines Flight 77 had already been hijacked when Andrew Card spoke to Bush at 09:05. The last plane to be hijacked was United Airlines Flight 93, at 09:28; it failed to reach the hijackers' target, instead crashing in a field in Pennsylvania after its other occupants tried to take back the cockpit.
Editions
</references>