While lifelong learning is everyone's aspiration, time and age make lifelong teaching impossible. That being the case, I will retire as a Math Faculty member from San Jose City College at the end of the spring semester. After 15 years, I leave with an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the opportunity to nurture eager knowledge seekers and see them bloom. Few things in life can equal the satisfaction of seeing students find their academic footing and face life with confidence and creativity.
I came to teaching late in
life after spending three restless decades at various hi-tech companies in
Silicon Valley. “An aim in life,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, “is the only
fortune worth finding.” It is possible to go through an entire lifetime without
finding one’s “fortune.” I am grateful I found mine after years of wandering in
the technological wilderness.
Here are some personal
observations on teaching and learning related to community colleges and the challenges
they confront moving forward.
First, community college
students, many first-generation from low-income families, hunger for
affirmation of their worth. They are like dormant seeds waiting for rain and expect
us to be that rain. While they understand that teachers require rigor and
excellence from them, they also expect such expectations to be tempered by
compassion and some occasional humor.
Here’s an example. 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 that she was behind and couldn’t even
understand Measures of Center. “Should I drop your class?” she asked.
After a
little thinking, I replied, “Don’t drop. Let’s meet during office hours and see
what we can do.”
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 began making progress. She took charge of her learning. One day she stunned
me by disclosing, “I had a brain aneurysm three years ago and am still
recovering from it. But it’s finally clicking in my brain.”
Maria
received a well-deserved “A” in my class and is currently majoring in
psychology at a local university. Miracles occur at the intersection of “Highly
demanding” and “highly supportive” for both students and teachers.
Second, students engage if
they see the relevance of what they learn in the classroom to what they
experience in their lives outside the classroom. Should they buy that laptop warranty
(probability and statistics)? How do doctors put the brakes on a pandemic (exponential
growth of viruses versus exponential decay via vaccines)? How does math relate
to English, physics and other disciplines (real-life problems span disciplines)
that reveal their synergy? Relevance and connections deepen intuition and
imagination and help students appreciate the power and beauty of their subjects.
Third, we owe it to our
students to bring fresh insights and perspectives into our teaching even if we have
taught the same material a thousand times. This requires keeping up with the
latest developments in our changing fields. How do we capture patterns with mathematical
formulas, whether the patterns are in sunflower spirals or the emergence of underground
cicadas? How can we differentiate True Positives from False Positives in clinical
tests while taking into account the Base Rate? How does math relate to
democracy, elections, birthrates and healthcare? We must reflect in our
teaching the dynamic nature of knowledge.
Fourth, student affirmations inspire teachers too! We also need to know from time to time that we are igniting the curiosity of students and instilling in them the joy of learning. Every semester, I get an email or two from students that make my spirit soar. One recent missive reads: "I've been working on my psychology course and found myself repeatedly returning to concepts you taught us. Even though we focused on statistics, the way you explained numbers and analyses as tools to understand the world around us has had a lasting impact on me."
A single vote of student confidence per semester can be enough vindication for a teacher.
Now to challenges,
specifically two. First is the one posed by the Genie in the Bottle, also known
as Artificial Intelligence (AI), and its even more powerful version, Artificial
General intelligence (AGI), capable of doing almost all cognitive tasks
a human can do. Ask any question and tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT,
Microsoft’s CoPilot and Google Gemini give sophisticated answers, albeit with
errors that, with newer versions, become fewer. Having difficulty with a
particularly pesky algebra or calculus problem? No problem, ask AI. “What
effect does climate change have on human and animal migration? Illustrate with
specific examples.” Rejoice, AI will create the whole enchilada for you!
Preventing students from
using AI is as futile as King Canute commanding incoming tides to halt. The question
is how to use AI to complement critical thinking and genuine learning among
students without short-circuiting the process. Recently, the California State
University (CSU) system (23 campuses, 460,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff)
and the University of California (UC) system, (9 campuses, 295,000 students and
265,000 faculty and staff), launched initiatives with leading Silicon Valley AI
companies to train students and faculty in the best use of AI tools.
California’s Community College (CCC) system, the largest in the nation with 116
colleges, about 2 million students and 91,328 faculty and staff, is pursuing
similar goals. CCC’s Academic Senate has urged Chancellor Dr. Sonya Christian
to establish a centralized CCC AI Commons to provide access to generative AI
tools and resources for students, faculty and staff, to be modeled after CSU’s
centralized AI Commons (https://genai.calstate.edu)
These initiatives are likely
to go through several iterations before a coherent, consistent and ethical use
of AI in education emerges. But the process has begun and that’s progress.
The second challenge is more
daunting: The Trump Administration’s war on education. Diversity, Equity and
Inclusivity (DEI) programs, a hallmark of community colleges, are being
dismantled. There is pressure on colleges and universities to revise
curriculums to reflect a more conservative agenda. The threat of mass
deportations has unsettled CCC’s estimated 100,000 undocumented students,
including those protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
To counter the threat, colleges are stepping up efforts to provide legal
protection to students and their families. My college, for instance, like most CCC’s,
is offering free legal and mental health services to allay the uncertainty,
anxiety and fear of students.
As I get ready to retire, I
feel the tug of two opposing thoughts. The first is sadness at the enormous
damage the Trump administration is inflicting on education in general and on our
colleges and universities in particular. The second is my faith in the
resilience and power of our institutions to protect the vulnerable and the
marginalized and to sustain the freedoms that define our democracy. There may
be a few defeats and setbacks in the beginning but I am confident our institutions
will come through in the end.
