Lindsey Stull | A chance to explore

Of all my classes last semester, I earned my lowest grade in what was undoubtedly the easiest - a French history class. Why? Because it was a painfully shallow look at a topic I'm sincerely interested in, and it hurt my soul to do busywork and listen closely to annoyingly broad generalizations. So why did I take it? Cross Cultural Analysis, baby.

At Penn, it seems par for the course that each student take a class or two which he or she really despises. Sometimes, just the first week of a writing seminar results in what amounts to class-wide PMS. While I understand suffering through physics if I want to cure people's diseases someday, it's ludicrous to think that Intro to Geology and the like will really benefit an English major. Just one more sector checked off the list.

The Class of 2010 will not have to fill their schedules with quite as many obligatory courses as those who came before, but we also have fewer options to complete our seven sector requirements and five Foundational Approaches (six for the Class of 2012 and later).

Gee, what a blessing - less time spent taking classes we're even less interested in!

As SAS Dean Dennis DeTurck told the DP in February, the new curriculum was intended to add "a little more structure." However, by unnecessarily restricting the number of courses for each requirement, the new curriculum actually just packs a small number of classes with students who are less engaged - detracting from the quality of discussion as well as the general class standard.

I saw this first-hand in an in-major intro course - once a small class with field trips, individual presentations, and a bit of a challenge, it bloated last semester to accommodate 60-something students trying to fill the Society sector requirement. While the lectures and material caught my attention, the learning atmosphere suffered from an average of 30 students who slept and texted through each period. Many of the rest didn't bother showing up at all.

With the curriculum limping along as it is, leaving a wide swath of frustrated, dozing students in its wake, it seems there are two viable options: instate a core curriculum or allow more classes to count for requirements.

The reasoning behind a core, such as that followed by Columbia, usually includes two arguments: a common education exposing students to necessary texts and ideas (since all students read Kant, Freud, the Bible, etc.) and a common education for the sake of informed discussion and shared experience (since everyone reads them around the same time). I understand the logic, since here at Penn we obviously can't communicate with anyone lacking concurrent exposure to Sophocles. Not.

The wide range of courses at Penn allows us all to shape opinions informed by different fields and disciples, which helps us to educate each other. My Wharton friends give me the economic justification behind certain actions; I fire back with the evolutionary or neurological ones.

But that only works if we have some passion for our courses. With an eye to that goal, the curriculum should be expanded. If the Department of History calls a course its own, it should fill the History and Tradition req. Only five classes in the biology department, less than a fifth offered, count toward the Living World sector - and that excludes BIOL 240: Ecology, which apparently doesn't teach students the "analyses of evolutionary processes and ecological systems" mentioned in the sector's description.

Nowhere is this trend more evident than in the category of writing seminars. My writing class compared just slightly favorably to eating glass for an hour and a half twice a week.

Wharton and College junior Julia Rebrova also found her writing seminar to be "too elementary." She felt that composing a series of short essays didn't help her college writing skills, since "no other class has you write two-page papers."

Many of Penn's courses are paper-based; why not call the writing req filled when a student earns an average grade or better in a class that requires an extended paper?

Penn offers a vast number of courses, many of which students would love to experience. Requirements should help guide students to new areas of interest, not force us into classes we'll slouch through like the picky collegians we are.

Lindsey Stull is a rising College junior and SP editorial page editor from Oklahoma City, Ok. Her e-mail address is stull@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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