{"id":313,"date":"2006-06-13T11:14:44","date_gmt":"2006-06-13T11:14:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/06\/13\/math-isnt-that-hard\/"},"modified":"2006-06-13T11:14:44","modified_gmt":"2006-06-13T11:14:44","slug":"math-isnt-that-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/06\/13\/math-isnt-that-hard\/","title":{"rendered":"Math Isn&#8217;t That Hard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><cite>Inside Higher Ed<\/cite> has a story this morning about <a href=\"http:\/\/insidehighered.com\/news\/2006\/06\/13\/smith\">Smith College moving toward requiring math<\/a>. Smith, a women&#8217;s college in Massacusetts, has had an &#8220;open curriculum&#8221; (i.e., no requirements at all) for many years, which has allowed lots of students to graduate without ever taking a course requiring math or mathematical reasoning.<\/p>\n<p>They haven&#8217;t introduced a requirement yet, but they&#8217;re apparently leaning in that direction. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.steelypips.org\/principles\/2005_02_06_principlearchive.php#110778349309121481\">As you might expect<\/a>, I&#8217;m all in favor of this&#8211; I think we need to demand a greater level of mathematical knowledge from all our college graduates.<\/p>\n<p>As a confirmed liberal arts college person, I understand some of the attraction of the &#8220;open curriculum&#8221; model, but at the same time, that makes it too easy for students to end up with an education that neglects huge and important areas of  study. I think you need to have some fairly minimal requirements in place to ensure at least some breadth&#8211; I think it&#8217;s a travesty for someone to be able to graduate college without ever taking a single math course.<\/p>\n<p>(Of course, there are undoubtedly people out there who think it&#8217;s a travesty that I have a liberal arts degree, and never took either art or music&#8230;)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Inside Higher Ed has a story this morning about Smith College moving toward requiring math. Smith, a women&#8217;s college in Massacusetts, has had an &#8220;open curriculum&#8221; (i.e., no requirements at all) for many years, which has allowed lots of students to graduate without ever taking a course requiring math or mathematical reasoning. They haven&#8217;t introduced&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/06\/13\/math-isnt-that-hard\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Math Isn&#8217;t That Hard<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}