Instructivist points me to this Newsday article detailing how New York City teachers have been ordered to teach for no more than 10 minutes per class session.

Many are ready to overthrow a "workshop model" of teaching that limits lessons to 10 minutes, with the chunk of the 40-minute period reserved for student group work -- with minimal adult interference allowed, some said -- and the last five minutes spent sharing results.

"We are no longer teachers. We are coat racks," said Steve Nathan, a social studies teacher at Russell Sage Junior High School in Forest Hills.

Chancellor Joel Klein last year introduced the workshop model primarily in math and English, but this year, critics said, many more schools across the city have been ordered to follow the model in every subject and every day.

[ . . . . . ]

One rationale is students learn well from peers, but teachers report that students without a clue aren't picking up much from each other during group work.

The result is that instructors, trying to "sneak in teaching," have been written up for workshop model lapses, union officials said. Other teachers have conspired with students to act immersed in the workshop model if an administrator pops into the room.

"Can you imagine trying to teach physics in 10-minute sound bites?" said Jeff Zahler, teachers union representative for Queens school district 30.

[ . . . . ]

Much of the workshop structure was shaped 30 years ago by eight city teachers, including Carmen Farina, now the deputy chancellor for instruction. The method has variations but the lesson time is usually short.

A-HA! Count me as unsurprised that this is the pet theory of some educrat who probably did a make-work doctoral dissertation on this and now that she has the authority, is itching to enforce the implementation of this idiocy. I wonder if she's ever heard of the adage "The blind leading the blind."

Perhaps Deputy Chancellor Farina should have insisted on controlled studies being conducted on her pet theory to test its efficacy rather than relying on her own anecdotal evidence for her own idea. Do you think she had a vested interest in seeing her idea being implemented? Do you think that she perhaps wasn't as objective as she should have been injudging the merits of this radical pedagogy? Do you think that perhaps there is an effort to shape reality to conform to the idealism of such enlightened instruction? Think about it - the old ways are so restrictive and strip the students of dignity for they have to sit and listen to a teacher drone on about matters. Wouldn't it be far more uplifting to the student's dignity if they could free themselves from the shackles of heirarchy and, with their peers, discover the knowledge for themselves. I'm sure that Deputy Chancellor Farina has no trouble in overlooking the dismal failure of this approach for she knows that it is a more progresseive and uplifting approach and if just applied with more diligence it will yield the results that, in her heart of hearts, she knows are possible. She just knows it, and that's all that matters.

If Deputy Chancellor Farina is so enamored of this idea, the best way to validate it is to experiment with pedagogy in a statistical universe of diverse and competing schools. Each school can teach as they see best, the results can be compared and the winners and losers, by whichever metrics you favor, can be compared. Far better to limit the damage of ego-driven idiocy to a few schools that are self-selected by parents and teachers rather than mandating an intellectual crippling of a whole generation of the city's students.

Oh, and don't miss the icing on the cake - at the bottom of the Newsday article is an ad for Sylvan Learning Center.