Two worries keep surfacing in staffrooms across the country: how disengaged many students have become, and how quickly the facts they memorize slip away. Plenty of teenagers see history as a dull list of dates to be crammed before a test and forgotten soon after. At Birchwood Secondary School, one history teacher set out to change that, which is why visitors are often surprised to walk past Daniel Okafor's room and find students in costume, staging a trial or acting out a treaty negotiation rather than copying notes from the board. Is it a history class, or is it a drama club? The honest answer is that it is a bit of both. Mr. Okafor hit on an unusual way to tackle both problems at once: he wove role-play and reenactment into his ordinary lessons.

The idea grew out of his own years at university. "I could not keep the dates of one dry period straight to save my life," said Okafor. "Then I joined a student society that staged a historical play, and suddenly it all stuck. Living through the events, even in pretend, fixed them in my memory, and my marks rose." He brought the same approach into his classroom last year, and it lifted both his students' interest and their results. Although the teenagers were enthusiastic and their progress was plain, he ran into resistance from the principal, Frances Whitmore, who doubted that time spent acting had any place in a history course. "Drama is a fine pastime, but I assumed it would only pull students away from the real material," Whitmore admitted. It turns out her reaction is a common misconception.