Ontario High School Mathematics: Failing Our STEM Students
My first year engineering students sat their first ever university exam yesterday. While I was walking around answering questions and queries, the one question which was repeated over and over was the following: “The formula for the volume of a cylinder is not on the formula sheet. How do I calculate it?”. This was astounding, coming as it did from so many Ontario High School Graduates. It’s almost unbelievable.
A lot of them did not know it at all. This is bad. I strongly believe that aspiring engineers should have a good grasp of geometry coming out of high school. Clearly they do not.
Even worse, they did not know how to deduce the volume from the picture of a cylinder as a height times the area of a circular base.
So we have students who have not received a proper education in geometry in High School. I can almost see why they might not have memorized a formula. After all, they can always look it up, right? Well, yes, assuming you have books or a working internet, which means a lot of fixed infrastructure has to be working. So suppose there’s a natural disaster, like an ice storm, or an earthquake, which knocks out power and internet? Do all our junior engineers suddenly stop being able to function professionally? Particularly when engineers might be rather useful, to help repair the damage! Not good enough, Ontario Education. Not good enough by half.
Even worse, it was quite clear that students had not been trained to deduce the volume as the product of the surface area of a circle and the height. The surface area of the circle formula was definitely on that formula sheet. So not only has the education system managed to fail in giving the students the deep knowledge where they remember the formula, it has also failed to give them the deductive reasoning skills to work it out. Double Whammy fail.
Now, don’t for a minute think that I’m blaming the students for this. They are an industrious and smart group of students. They have been failed by their education system at secondary level.
For the record, here is the formula for the volume of a cylinder, with radius r and height h:
So, Ontario education, what are you going to do about this lamentable situation?
