Word: gleason
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Gleason says that the American public seems to be convinced that doing math--even something as simple as multiplying fractions--is a matter of ability and not of hard work...
...Harvard, Gleason was also the founder of the Core Curriculum's Quantitative Reasoning Requirement (QRR), a test on basic statistical and math abilities that all undergraduates must pass by the end of their freshman year. He currently serves as the QRR's chairman and as a representative to the Core's Board of Advisers...
When the Core and QRR were being formed, several math professors believed that all Harvard freshmen should be required to take basic calculus courses. Gleason instead decided about 10 years ago to focus the QRR on the numerical skills an average student would need to survive college-level courses...
...Gleason says that it was not until he began to work with the Core and the QRR, in fact, that he realized the extent to which many students loathe and even fear working with numbers...
...Deborah Hughes Hallet felt that I didn't have a good idea of what students outside the math concentration were like and suggested that I teach some students who were taking math only as a requirement," says Gleason, who will be head tutor of the Math Department this spring...