When transitioning from high school to university there is a significant change in the way that courses are taught and, as a result, how students learn the subject matter. Course attendance, other than exams and labs, is no longer mandatory and class time is mostly devoted to an instructor lecturing on course material with separate tutorial sessions, instead of having them clumped together on a daily basis. Furthermore, the speed instructors teach material is significantly faster compared to high school. In a span of 3 months, a university course can cover the material of as many as three high school courses and many high schools do not even cover many of the subjects in first-year university.
So what is the point of all of this? There are two problems with the transition from high school to university and with high school itself: its filtering capabilities and its ability to adequately prepare students for post-secondary education.
Filtering capability refers to the ability of high school to make sure that students unprepared to enter intensive programs such as Engineering, Mathematics and English are not entering those programs and wasting their time and money. At the same time, the system does not provide enough direction for those students who may not understand what it means to major in Sociology, Mechatronics Engineering, or Knowledge Integration. Moreover, there is too much of a push for every single student to go to university when that is not necessarily the right place for him or her to go.
There are three main areas that we can focus on in regards to providing students with direction: difficulty of classes, availability of classes, and adequate student support. These may sound pretty broad, but each contributes to the core problems that we face.
The first problem area, difficulty of classes, has two components: the amount of material covered in each course and the speed at which said material is covered.
To start, we’ll focus on Math. Currently, most high schools follow the basic Ontario Curriculum math courses from grade nine to twelve. This starts with an “Academic” and an “Applied” stream and then branches into “University,” “Mixed,” “College” and “Workplace.” Once a student reaches grade twelve there are three courses offered to those who took grade 11 “University” math (known as Functions): Advanced Functions, Calculus and Vectors (whose prerequisite is Advanced Functions) and Data Management. At first glance, this seems to be a lot of choice; however, the way the material is covered is the problem.
The three major problem courses right now are Functions and its two grade twelve equivalents. In Functions, one learns about characteristics of functions, different types of functions (exponential, polynomial, trigonometric, etc.), sequences and series. In Advanced Functions, one learns even more about functions and learns how to find the instantaneous rate of change without actually doing derivatives.
The problem is that the course really does not have enough material to justify its existence. All trigonometry covered in the course is in radians instead of degrees and there are even more characteristics of functions that manage to appear in this course. To provide perspective, all the material covered in both functions courses was more than covered in approximately 5 weeks in 1A. It is not necessary to have two courses that take up the equivalent of an entire school year to cover material that could easily be condensed into one faster-paced course.
Moving on to the last course, Calculus and Vectors, which focuses on two drastically different (until later in University at least) topics: Calculus and Linear Algebra. This course was the demon spawn when the Ontario government decided that having a dedicated course to Linear Algebra and Discrete Math and only one grade 12 functions course was too difficult on students.
The first half of the course, depending on what school the course is taught, focuses on limits and both implicit and regular derivatives. The problem here is twofold: integrals are not covered and derivatives could have been covered properly in the first place instead of dancing around them in Advanced Functions. Ignoring integrals is similar to showing someone how to add but not subtract. Derivation and integration are inverse operations of each other and are essential to most advanced science and math courses.
The second half of the course focuses on vectors, planes and solving planar intersections using matrices. This material lasts at most a week and a half in a first-year linear algebra course and does not go into any real depth about the important aspects of Linear Algebra, such as matrix multiplication or finding determinants. The other missing area is that discrete math is completely ignored. This is the area of mathematics that most students seem to struggle within first year and avoiding it in high school does nothing but compound the problem.
Next we’ll discuss the science courses, Chemistry and Physics. Both of these courses are mandatory for anyone entering engineering, and in many cases are required for entry into sciences as well. Almost all equations in physics are based in calculus and were derived using derivatives and integrals. The problem is that grade 12 physics, which deals with many of the same concepts that are covered in first year, can be taken without having any prior calculus experience. Similarly, important aspects of vectors such as dot product and cross product are also covered in a hand-wavy manner.
Tying this all together, we end up with a series of math-intensive courses that are not intense enough, spend too much time on vague mathematical explanations that could be more direct and spend too much time on concepts that do not need the time. This leads to students entering programs thinking they are really good at physics or calculus and then getting a major reality check after they have written a cheque to the university. Furthermore, this can turn off many students to these disciplines because they find the material is boring or moving too slowly. An unfortunate problem is that this applies to many humanities and social sciences too.
The humanities and social science majors face a slightly different problem. It is not that the courses pile review upon review, but instead they do not provide enough direction for someone trying to figure out what major they should choose when applying to university. As mentioned earlier, many students have no idea what exactly a major is other than from a description on a university website or what a guidance counselor tells them. Most high schools do not offer complete courses in many of the most popular majors at universities and then expect a student to know exactly what they want to do. Moreover, because of the fairly open course requirements to get into these programs, many students are not prepared for the readings and papers required in almost all of these majors. As we can see, this is a major problem.
To summarize, the Ontario high school system currently faces many problems with its ability to adequately direct and prepare students for post-secondary education. Too much time is spent on repeating material, many courses give hand wavy explanations for key mathematical concepts and many times there is no way for a student to figure out if they like a subject because it is not offered.
Now that we’ve covered problems with high school, questions arise of how we can we make the system better to avoid these problems. Well, that is for the next issue (for the sheer fact that it is equally as long as the problems) but keep in mind that many of these solutions will take complete reforms to the system and in many cases be extremely difficult to implement without a desire for change.
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