How to increase enrollment at community colleges? As a math professor at San Jose City College (SJCC), I have three ideas based on my experience with students.

First, widen the scope of Community College’s High School Dual or Concurrent Enrollment.

In the summer of 2022, I had the privilege of teaching math at SJCC’s Milpitas extension, a collaboration between the Milpitas Unified School District and SJCC. To see students from 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grades earning college credits while attending high school to get a head start in their college careers was inspiring. We had animated discussions about applying quadratic equations to describe the arc of a baseball, exponential functions to describe the growth of viruses and probability to quantify uncertainty.

As expected, some dual-enrollment students attend SJCC after graduating from high school each year. While many community colleges have similar collaborations with their local high schools, Kern County Community College District spanning the San Joaquin Valley, eastern Sierra and Mojave Desert being one of the largest, there remains room for growth. SJCC, for instance, can collaborate with more local schools through an effective outreach program to ensure a steady stream of new students.

Second, improve the quality of college websites.

This seems obvious but is often overlooked. Online users, particularly prospective or current students, spend on average three minutes and visit 2-3 pages per session during which they either find what they are looking for or they leave. Many community college websites are clunky and confusing. Finding information often turns into a wild-goose chase. Students complain, and I verified it myself, that it is easier to retrieve information from the SJCC website through Google than through the website itself.

Effective websites have no clutter and have elements that spark digital joy, such as easy navigation, mobile friendly, fewest clicks for information and accessibility for all. Build coherent websites, and they will come.

Third, California’s community colleges must become equal partners to the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) systems. With a population of just over 39 million and an estimated GDP of about $4 trillion, California is poised to overtake Germany as the fourth-largest economy in the world, behind only the United States, China and Japan.

California’s economy has a strong positive correlation with the quality of education it offers its residents. While the eight-campus UC and 23-campus CSU systems have a combined student population of about 750,000 from relatively well-to-do families, our 116 community colleges educate more than double that many students.

California’s 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education that vastly privileges UCs and CSUs over community colleges is obsolete. Technology has transformed teaching and learning and the dynamics between research and career. To paraphrase Dorothy, “Toto, I have a feeling we are not in the ‘60s anymore.”

California’s community colleges do the heavy lifting of educating most of its students beyond high schools, especially those from disadvantaged families. By offering baccalaureate degrees without any constraints from UCs and CSUs, for example, community colleges can attract more students, one of the ways to ensure that the Golden State will continue to flourish for decades to come.

Hasan Zillur Rahim is a professor of mathematics at San Jose City College.

Equity is, of course, a noble idea but the devil lies in the details. No two students with special needs – physical, mental, academic, financial – are alike. Colleges with limited resources are hard-pressed to set each such student up for success. Tutoring, counseling, ease of access to facilities and resources help but some still fail because the equitable and inclusive services do not reach them until it’s too late.

My experience as a faculty member at a community college has convinced me that what also holds back differently-abled students from reaching their full potential is a missing piece in the equity equation: The summon to excellence.

Too often, we treat special needs students as if it is sufficient to provide some tools for them to somehow stay afloat. If they manage to pass a class with a ‘C’, we compliment ourselves with a job well done. That they can equal or even excel “normal” students is something we rarely instill in them.

Yet when we have great expectations, supported by attentive and rigorous care, miracles happen. Some teachers are born miracle workers who can motivate struggling students to reach for the stars. I am not one of them. What I have tried over the years, however, is convincing these students that they are as good as any other student, that they can still be peak performers with discipline and hard work and with a resilience that rejects setbacks and negativity.

My success rate with such students certainly leaves room for improvement, but when a miracle happens, I learn anew what teaching is all about.

Let me explain. Maria looked lost on the first day of my statistics class. I saw fear in her eyes, even tears. She emailed me after two weeks of instruction that she was already behind, unable to understand what measures of center meant. “Should I drop your class,” she asked.

After weighing the options, I finally replied: “Don’t drop. Let’s meet during office hours and see where you are.”

We met twice weekly over the next several weeks, going over problems step-by-step. “It’s not easy,” I told her. “I had the same difficulty you are facing when I was learning this.”

Slowly, Maria started making progress. She began taking charge of her learning and, by extension, her destiny. One day she shocked me by saying, “I had a brain aneurysm three years ago and still recovering from it. But it’s finally clicking in my brain.”

I was stunned. Here was a student I was about to abandon if I had taken the easy way out by telling her to drop my class.

Maria received a well-deserved “A” in my class and is currently majoring in psychology at a local university. Since that time and through the pandemic, Maria’s words, “It’s finally clicking in my brain,” continue to inspire me.

My experience isn’t the same with all challenged students. Some vanish into the void by dropping out, others barely hang on. But many persist and flourish and find joy in learning they never thought they would.

I have colleagues at my college who routinely perform magic on their students and at scale. I hope to gain insights from them but for now, the equation that motivates me to teach is simple: Equity + Excellence = Transcendence.

Hasan Zillur Rahim is a professor of mathematics at San Jose City College.

As students and teachers prepare to return to classrooms this fall, equally affecting parents because of the stress they endured with their children’s education during the pandemic, I want to share some insights from my online experience that may be useful for all three groups across grades and disciplines. Of course, the deadly delta variant can still blow away our best-laid plans with the force of a tornado,

First, online instruction en masse has gone through its trial by fire for almost two years and has proved its viability. Sure, it has drawbacks — screen fatigue, family fracture, unequal access to technology, widening performance gaps — but, by and large, remote education succeeded as a practical and scalable alternative to in-person teaching. Besides, there were advantages to virtual classrooms: “anytime, anywhere” flexibility, dispensing with the need to get ready and arrive in schools on time, and similar school-day overheads.

Second, and more importantly, online teaching has raised the bar for classroom teaching. If online teaching was good, in-person teaching must be better, a fervent wish of parents heightened by the pandemic. This requires that teachers be more deliberate in inspiring deep learning, critical thinking and creativity among students. Deep learning demands greater depth on fewer topics instead of shallow discussions on many. Critical thinking requires students to think clearly, logically and independently. Creativity requires dealing with uncertainty, seeing connections between disciplines, and solving real-world problems from different angles.

This can happen only if teachers invest the time and the effort to create empathic, engaging and equitable classroom environments, from kindergarten to postsecondary education. Some teachers have the gift of inspiring the joy of learning in their students but most of us, myself included, must work at it.

An example will clarify. Discussing hypothesis tests in statistics, I challenged my students to define false positive and false negative in the context of coronavirus testing and identify which one posed the greater threat. I gave them the sample sizes that Moderna and Pfizer used for their control and treatment groups and the number of subsequent coronavirus infections in each group to figure out the success rate of the vaccines. Students were animated and invigorated. They had taken control of their own learning. I realized that if I could do this in a virtual classroom, I should do even better in a face-to-face setting.

Hasan Zillur Rahim is a professor of mathematics at San Jose City College. 

The literal answer: “Going nowhere. Staying put. Neither a carrier nor a receiver be!”  It’s the deeper aspect of the question that unsettles me: Where, indeed, am I going with my life? Is it aligned with God’s expectations of me, or am I going astray from a combination of ego, ingratitude and other failings?

Fasting from dawn to dusk for a month requires Muslims to reflect on life’s big questions of meaning and purpose, of undergoing a spiritual renewal. But this Ramadan is unlike any other, just as Passover and Easter were for Jews and Christians. What I am learning, though, is that confinement can make contemplating life’s big questions actually easier. A closeup of mortality is a catalyst for spirituality. Apple’s Steve Jobs gave voice to this in an address at Stanford in 2005 after being diagnosed with cancer: “Remembering I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, pride, fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

Deciding “what is truly important” is unique to each of us. I find that my quest for it in this Ramadan is taking me into unexplored regions of my heart.

I am a math teacher at a local college. Like millions of teachers, I had to switch from classroom to online teaching overnight. COVID-19 gave me a grim way of explaining exponential growth and “flattening the curve” to my students. But when I sent reminders to students falling behind, I received responses that stunned me, like this from a student: “I have not had a chance to finish the test because I am an ICU nurse at a hospital, working 12-hour days since the pandemic, so missed the deadline. I have lost one colleague already and two who have tested positive who are currently managing their care at home. Please allow me a few extra days.”

I was filled with remorse for not knowing that some of my students were working in the front lines saving other lives while knowingly endangering theirs. Without empathy, I learned, there can be no spirituality, while with empathy, we can transform our vocations into higher callings.

I am discovering, too, that daily tasks I thought mundane were suffused with meaning. Preparing a meal with my wife to break our fast after sunset has acquired a transcendent quality. Another example: As an amateur birdwatcher, I found that hummingbirds were heavy drinkers, so keeping the feeder filled with nectar for these blurry bundles of energy feels sublime.

The sublime also surrounds services we take for granted. I always regarded mail delivery as a birthright but my experience with students without the luxury of staying home to earn a living made me see postal workers anew. Despite the pandemic, these soldiers forge on in sun and rain. I now make a point of greeting Jose, our mailman, as he makes his rounds on foot, masked and gloved.

The doors of our mosques are closed, as are those of churches and synagogues, but I sense windows opening in my heart into a universe of grace and clarity, as I know they are in the hearts of my fellow-Americans. I pray that these windows will remain open for as long as we live.

Hasan Zillur Rahim is a professor of mathematics at San Jose City College.

The context of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address underscores its relevance. Union armies had defeated the Confederates four months earlier in the decisive Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest in the Civil War. Haunted by grief at the war’s toll, Lincoln nevertheless saw himself as the guardian of the nation’s soul in abolishing slavery and preserving the republic. He warned the gathering of 15,000 that the Civil War — which would last for another 17 months — was testing whether the nation that was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal … can long endure.”

Yet the nation had to endure even if the war was threatening to tear it apart. “We are met on a great battlefield of that war,” said Lincoln. “We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.” Evoking transcendent words like liberty, dedicate, consecrate, hallow, devotion, birth, freedom and God, Lincoln rallied the Union forces to persevere until the Confederates surrendered and the nation could emerge intact and stronger. He was also using the moral force of his presidency to put principle over privilege, pluralism over tribalism.

America has fallen far since Trump took the oath of office in 2016 through his solipsism and his brazen acts to preempt and pervert the constitution. While the list is long, the words he uses at rallies and in tweets to attack individuals and institutions opposing his maleficence indicate the extent of his transgressions: fake, suck, savages, shifty, liar, lowlife, human scum, go back.

Yet we also hear the echo of Lincoln’s message of duty, honor and warning in the words of public servants speaking out against Trump and his cabal. One such is Marie Yovanovitch, former ambassador to Ukraine, forced out for refusing to play along with Trump’s foreign policy shenanigans. In her deposition to the House impeachment investigators, she said: “I have served this nation honorably for more than 30 years. I, like my colleagues at the State Department, have always believed that we enjoyed a sacred trust with our government. We frequently put ourselves in harm’s way to serve this nation. And we do that willingly, because we believe in America and its special role in the world. We also believe that our government will protect us if we come under attack from foreign interests. That basic understanding no longer holds true.”

As we prepare to vote in the presidential election in less than a year, we should remember the concluding words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address containing the most profound definition of democracy: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Donald Trump is determined to turn the United States into a “government of me, by me, for me.” On Nov. 3, 2020, we will vote not only for candidates but also for the heart, mind and soul of America, for truth, accountability and rule of law so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Hasan Zillur Rahim is a professor of mathematics and statistics at San Jose City College. 

Hate is not a mental illness.

While these words aren’t original to us, they speak a truth we desperately need in the aftermath of yet more violence in Gilroy, El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. It’s a truth that unites us, emboldens us and makes clear the work that is ours to do in this community. And what is that work?

To stand against hatred and to stand beside those with mental illness.

Despite what the media and our elected officials may allege, those with mental illnesses are not the primary perpetrators of gun violence. Yes, of course, untreated psychosis can lead to violence, but the vast majority of gun violence is the product of far more insidious problems — racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Our diverse spiritual traditions have much to say about the many faces of hatred and the violence they incite. “Whoever kills a person (unjustly) … it is as though he has killed all mankind. And whoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved all mankind.” (The Qu’ran)

Our traditions also make it clear how easy it is to point a finger at others without taking a hard look at ourselves: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own?” Jesus asks.

The plank in our own eyes is how passive we’ve been as we’ve allowed the media to perpetuate the myth that mental illness equals violence. The plank in our own eyes is how little we’ve done to challenge all that fuels hatred.

“Hark! Your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the earth,” God says to Cain in the Torah. The blood that has been spilled far exceeds that at the Gilroy Garlic Festival or the Walmart in El Paso or outside the Ned Peppers Bar in Dayton. It is blood that is being spilled in suicides in our community every day as people with mental illnesses struggle not just with their symptoms but also with our disdain.

Hate is not a mental illness. It is a condition that must be transformed, as Thich Nhat Hanh teaches, into love.

Together, we commit ourselves to transforming hatred into love by speaking against extreme acts of violence but also against the small discriminations and implicit biases that plague us all.

Hasan Rahim is the Outreach Director of the Evergreen Islamic Center of San Jose. Rabbi Melanie Aron leads Congregation Shir Hadash of Los Gatos. Rev. Cindy McCalmont is FaithNet Coordinator at NAMI Santa Clara County.

His experiment lasted two years, two months and two days. “I went to the woods,” he wrote in his 1854 masterpiece “Walden”, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

For Thoreau, a meticulous observer of nature, “essential facts of life” included the state of the flora and the fauna at Walden and at his nearby birthplace of Concord, and the timeless lessons embedded in the cycles of the seasons.

Thoreau’s reflections on nature and human nature seem more relevant today than in the pre-Civil War years of his time. Although he shrugged off as coincidence his “deliberate living” commencing on Independence Day, it is instructive to imagine what Thoreau would make of America today and how he would deal with our current crises.

Here is the Bard of Walden delivering his Independence Day address, circa 2019:

“The pink mayflowers and the lavender azaleas are blooming earlier at Walden by almost a week than in my time. Average temperature of a Concord spring has increased by 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the dark days of slavery. Only the willfully blind and the terminally ignorant fail to see that the cause is climate change. Greenhouse gas emission continues to destroy the environment while rising sea level, 8 inches since my time, threatens millions and swells the number of refugees. I read a report that around 1 million species on earth face extinction, a biodiversity loss of catastrophic proportion. Anthropocene is real. If the planet dies, we die. To concerned Americans I say: Stand on your roof in the morning and like the chanticleer, wake up your neighbor to the existential threat posed by climate change and reckless industrialization.

But will you? Probably not. When I said our inventions were pretty toys that distracted our attention from serious things, I could never have imagined that two centuries later, it would be million times worse. You are buried in the small screen of your smart toys, oblivious to trees, birds, rivers, seasons. The mass of men lead lives of toxic desperation, addicted to the shallow stimuli of social media. Meanwhile, the disease of debt and fake ownership afflicts everyone. I found farmers in my time becoming slaves to banks to own their houses, but it was the mortgaged houses that owned them. Now the farmers are leaving or dying but the mass of men – from baristas at Starbucks in Concord to worker bees in Silicon Valley  – have succumbed to the Faustian Bargain, putting even lemmings jumping off cliffs to shame.

But I am optimistic. I am heartened by the sight of solar panels and wind turbines. I am inspired by women-led movements to turn America into a more humane country, for the promise of the Green New Deal and the fight against misogyny and kakistocracy. I applaud ordinary citizens uniting to prevent walls from going up and civility and decency from coming down. I am moved by the generosity of immigrants feeding traumatized migrants at our Southern border and by Americans rejecting the click-swipe-rate economy in favor of meaningful labor.

In consuming less, creating communities and connections, concentrating on clean energy, and caring for all living, sentient beings are the preservation of the world.

Hasan Zillur Rahim is a professor of mathematics at San Jose City College.

Known by the Arabic word Jumah (to gather together), the prayer is important for Muslims because of its emphasis in the Quran and because it brings the community together, from babies in strollers to the aged in wheelchairs. At our Evergreen Islamic Center in San Jose, an average of about 500 Muslims attend the Friday prayers.

In the last few years, with Islamophobia on the rise, I often found myself imagining my worst nightmare: One or more gunmen walk into the congregation and start mowing down worshipers. My worst nightmare has just been realized, not in San Jose, California, but in Christchurch, New Zealand, 7,000 miles away. But it could just as easily have happened here.

I am thinking of Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old white supremacist who murdered nine African Americans in June 2015 at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. “I did what I thought would make the biggest wave,” he wrote, “and now the fate of our race is in the hands of my brothers who continue to live freely.”

I am thinking of Robert Bowers, charged with killing 11 worshipers in October 2018 at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pa. While receiving medical care from a Jewish physician, he said he wanted all Jews to die.

Now we have the 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant, accused of killing at least 50 worshipers at two mosques in Christchurch on Friday. He too is a white supremacist who wrote of his need to defend “our land” from “invaders” to ensure “a future for white children.” His online manifesto was starker: Kill Muslim immigrants.

During the carnage that he was streaming live, he was heard saying: “There wasn’t even time to aim, there were so many targets.” He was shooting fish in a barrel, much like the white supremacist Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in a bomb and gun rampage in July 2011 in Norway.

What does this mean for Muslim-Americans? Do we believe Islamophobia and anti-Semitism is on the rise, with encouragement from on high? Yes, we do. Do we see white supremacy as an ideology that poses an existential threat for us? Yes, we do.

But will we let our fear and concern overwhelm our striving for a more inclusive society in America? No, we won’t.

At the same time, we have decided that lax security in our mosques is an invitation for disaster. At Evergreen Islamic Center, for instance, the board of directors is urgently laying plans for posting armed guards during Friday prayers. With Ramadan less than two months away, security will also likely be beefed-up throughout the holy month.

We are heartened by the support from Mayor Sam Liccardo’s office and from Police Chief Edgardo Garcia, who have promised more frequent patrol of our mosque. We hope this will become the norm throughout America until threats from terrorists of all persuasions are neutralized.

Hasan Zillur Rahim is a professor of mathematics at San Jose City College and the Outreach Director of the Evergreen Islamic Center (www.eicsanjose.org) in San Jose.

One strategy used to redress this grim reality was to pour resources into remedial math and English courses, populated disproportionately by African-American and Latino students. It failed abysmally. Only 18 percent of elementary algebra students completed transfer-level math to CSU and UC systems in three years, and only 6 percent of pre-algebra students.

Something radical had to be done. Enter Assembly Bill 705. Introduced by Jacqui Irwin, D-Thousand Oaks, it was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown on Jan. 1, giving community colleges a deadline for full implementation by the fall of 2019.

The two revolutionary aspects of the bill are: a) colleges must maximize the probability that a student enter and complete transfer-level coursework in math and English within one year and b) colleges must use high school coursework, high school grades or high school GPAs to place incoming students into transfer-level courses, providing concurrent support as needed.

To appreciate the radical nature of AB 705, consider what I have witnessed with heartbreaking regularity in my years of teaching math. Joe, a high-school graduate with a 3.0 GPA, enrolls in his local college as a springboard for admission to UC Davis to major in sustainable agriculture. He expects to spend at most 3 years to accumulate enough units to transfer. Without delving into his aspirations, however, the college gives him an impersonal placement test where he falters with fractions. He gets trapped into a three-semester sequence of non-transferable basic skills classes of pre-algebra, algebra 1 and 2. He manages to pass the first two but algebra 2, with complex conjugates, quadratic equations and such, proves insurmountable. Overcome by emotional and psychological problems, Joe drops out and accepts a low-wage job below his potential.

AB 705 recognizes that it is the structural problem of under-placement and long sequence of classes that prevent students like Joe from graduating. Under AB 705, Joe is placed in transferable statistics in his very first semester, with help in math provided as just-in-time or co-requisite remediation. Excited by the relevance of the predictive power of statistics to his major, Joe aces the course. In a year, he completes transfer-level math and English requirements for a four-year institution.

Pipe dream? No. Pilot projects at San Diego’s Cuyamaca College and San Bruno’s Skyline College among others have shown that placing students in transferable math and English courses based on high school GPA quadruples the completion rate.

AB 705 has its challenges and detractors. Some claim it is too draconian. Others, that it was forced down from above without adequate faculty consultation. These are legitimate concerns, but the overriding factor for embracing AB 705 is that through proper placement and emphasizing acceleration over remediation, it can lift students from failure to success.

The Golden State has the fifth largest economy in the world, after the United States, China, Japan, and Germany. Its demand for a skilled, innovative workforce is skyrocketing. California’s community colleges must play a significant role in nurturing and educating this workforce. Faculty, counselors and administrators must work together to help students reach the high bar set by AB 705. Knowingly or unknowingly, we have been guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations, with minority students bearing the brunt of our casually cruel mindset. We wrongly focus on what our students don’t know rather than what they know. The pilot projects have shown that students rise to the challenge of higher expectations. By demanding more, we can not only help our students succeed academically but also guide them toward a life of meaning and purpose.

Hasan Z. Rahim is a professor of math/statistics at San Jose City College.

Despite these dark developments, Muslims will welcome Ramadan with hope and optimism. This is what the month is about: confidence that the clouds will fade and the sun will shine as we strive to affirm God’s living presence and unite with other Americans to serve the common good.

What is it about fasting that inspires such confidence? The Koran explains: “Fasting is prescribed for you, as it was prescribed for those before you, so that you may learn self-restraint.”

Self-restraint both prohibits and promotes. The first includes abstaining not only from food and drink (often the easier part, even at 15 hours or more) but more importantly, from anger, arrogance, backbiting, lying, schadenfreude, solipsism, religious chauvinism, money mania and similar vices. The second includes a combination of gratitude, magnanimity, empathy, humility and moderation but above all, patience. Patience is the unifying virtue, which is why sabr, the Arabic word for patience, occurs over 100 times in the Koran.

Living up to the moral and spiritual demands of fasting is a struggle, especially when we recognize that God has no use for our hunger and thirst if we don’t curb our wayward thoughts, bad habits and dark desires. For me, patience is the elusive goal. . Patience gives me a keener sense of the value of time. Tolstoy was on to something when he said the two most powerful warriors were patience and time. Honoring time has helped me fast from the small screen and social media while gaining a deeper insight into “Memento Mori”: Remember, you will die.

If we claim that practicing self-restraint in Ramadan makes us better human beings, it must reflect in the way we interact with our families, communities and the larger society. Given the current political climate, meaningful engagement with our fellow Americans from all walks of life and spanning all faiths is critical.

A day before Thanksgiving in 2016, our Evergreen Islamic Center received a hate mail warning about the “new sheriff in town – President Donald Trump” who will do to us “what Hitler did to the Jews. You Muslims would be wise to pack your bags and get out of Dodge.”

When word leaked out, we were overwhelmed by the support we received from our neighbors, activists, reporters, politicians and law-enforcement officials. Their support continued into the 2017 Ramadan months later when larger than usual number of them joined us for community Iftar (breaking the fast) at sundown on Sundays.

This year we expect to host even more Americans during the Sunday Iftars. We particularly hope those who have misgivings about us and want to ask the hard questions will join us, too. We don’t have all the answers. All we know is that discussing concerns honestly and openly in mutual respect can remove fear and prejudice.

If nothing else, we hope they will come for the food, for one of our most heartening lessons of Ramadan has been that few things in life forge friendship more fiercely than food, spicy or not.

Hasan Zillur Rahim is a professor of mathematics at San Jose City College and the Outreach Director of the Evergreen Islamic Center (www.eicsanjose.org) in San Jose.