These are a few of the many articles I have published in San Jose Mercury News over the years as a teacher, an educator and a conscientious American citizen. Thank you for reading.
​(You can click on the link at the top of each article to read the article on the San Jose Mercury News website.)

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/05/25/opinion-memorial-day-the-gettysburg-address-and-the-november-2024-election/
Gettysburg Address offers special significance for Memorial Day
In this fateful election year, Abraham Lincoln’s words of courage and compassion can transcend political divisions
By HASAN ZILLUR RAHIM
PUBLISHED: May 25, 2024

On Memorial Day, we remember our fallen soldiers.

For several years I have visited California’s oldest secular cemetery, the Oak Hill Memorial Park in San Jose, every Memorial Day to silently express my gratitude to those who sacrificed their lives so we can bask in the sunshine of freedom and democracy.

Veterans and politicians make moving speeches and observe a minute of silence on this hallowed day as the U.S. flag flutters in the breeze, rustling the surrounding sycamore trees. Doves are released as symbols of unity and peace. Small flags line rows and rows of headstones of 14,000 veterans with names that connect the living to the dead: Joseph Milligan of Tennessee (World War I), Charles Harding of Colorado (World War II), Andrew Montello of California (Korea), and on and on.

This year, I will do something different. I will carry a copy of the address President Abraham Lincoln delivered at Gettysburg, Penn., on Nov. 19, 1863, and read it as I walk alongside the graves at Oak Hill. More than 160 years later, Lincoln’s timeless words speak to us with an urgency we must heed.

In particular, two issues demand our attention in this fateful election year. First, as much as we would like our democracy to be strong, it is, in reality, a fragile entity, as the Jan. 6 insurrection showed. Unless we are vigilant about safeguarding it, democracy can succumb to autocracy. Second, the most powerful tool to ensure the flourishing of democracy is to exercise our sacred right to vote. Ignoring or neglecting this right can open the gate to tyranny. Complacency is the enemy of democracy and good governance.

As Lincoln saw it, the Civil War tested the very survival of the nation “conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Slavery, the antithesis of equality, was the evil of his time, and until it was eliminated, even at the horrific cost of a North-South war, Lincoln knew America would not endure.

We may not have slavery today, but the challenges are as daunting. Despite making modest progress in race relations since Lincoln’s time, the undercurrent of racism in many facets of our lives continues to undermine America. And political division over issues such as reproductive freedom, affordable health care, an unfair tax code, gun violence, volatile borders and climate change also threaten the integrity of the Constitution and the survival of our nation.

I request my fellow Americans on this Memorial Day to conscientiously read the Gettysburg Address. It comprises just 272 words and took Lincoln only two minutes to deliver to the gathering of 15,000, yet it has the power to evoke the noble and the transcendent in each of us, a nation of almost 335 million.

The courage, compassion and vision inherent in the Gettysburg Address should persuade us not to think North or South, Blue or Red, coastal or inland, or working class or elite when we vote in the November election but instead, to think America.

As in Lincoln’s time, “the great task remaining before us” today is keeping our nation whole. We can do it by resolving that those who “gave the last full measure of devotion … shall not have died in vain.”

So while we enjoy the biryani and the barbecue on this Memorial Day, let us set aside some time to reflect on the Gettysburg Address so we can dedicate ourselves to the “unfinished work” that our fallen soldiers and veterans “have thus far so nobly advanced.”
 
Lincoln concluded his address with the hope that democracy “shall not perish from the earth.” While that remains our goal too, we must first ensure with our votes in November that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish” from these United States.

Hasan Zillur Rahim is a professor of mathematics at San Jose City College.
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​https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/01/11/opinion-california-must-reverse-community-college-enrollment-decline/ 
California must reverse community college enrollment decline
Enrollment has dropped by more than 14% since the pandemic, putting high school students at risk
By HASAN ZILLUR RAHIM
PUBLISHED: January 11, 2023

Enrollment at California’s 116 community colleges has fallen from the pre-pandemic peak of 2.1 million to 1.8 million, a decline of over 14%. It is critical that enrollment increases in the nation’s largest higher education system. Community colleges provide zero to low-cost quality education that gives students from struggling to middle-income families the skills needed to make a decent and meaningful living. If enrollment continues to decline, more Californians will miss out on the American promise than ever before.

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.
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https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/04/05/9093390/
The missing piece in the equity equation: excellence
Too often we treat special needs students as if it is sufficient to provide them with some tools just to stay afloat.
By HASAN ZILLUR RAHIM
PUBLISHED: April 5, 2022

Equity is a keyword defining the educational philosophy of California’s community colleges. Unlike equality, which aims to give every student the same resources and opportunities, equity attempts to give each student what s/he needs to succeed. It recognizes that underserved and historically marginalized students, often victims of myriad injustices, need additional help to achieve educational and professional goals similar to their more privileged counterparts.

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.
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https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/08/22/make-online-teaching-a-catalyst-for-better-classroom-teaching-and-learning/
Make online teaching a catalyst for better classroom teaching and learning
Commentary for Sunday, Aug. 22, 2021
By HASAN ZILLUR RAHIM
PUBLISHED: August 22, 2021

Until COVID-19, I never taught a class online. As a math professor, I found the idea of remote teaching as remote as the Milky Way. So, when forced to switch to online by the pandemic in the early spring of 2020, the sky fell on me. After the mist had cleared, however, I found to my surprise that I could do it, helped immeasurably by rigorous online training on the best practices of remote teaching by an expert at my 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.

After almost two years of online experience, it is clear to me that we need to radically rethink the way we teach and students learn. We must challenge our students with real-world problems beyond the textbook that compel them to think, ask deep and imaginative questions, and reflect on what it means to live a life of meaning and purpose. Good teaching, the ability to teach a subject well, is hard. Great teaching, the ability to care for students and inspire in them a passion for knowledge, is harder. It’s the latter that must be our goal when normalcy returns, for “education,” as W.B. Yeats said, “is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.”

Hasan Zillur Rahim is a professor of mathematics at San Jose City College. 
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https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/11/19/opinion-gettysburg-address-still-relevant-156-years-later/
Gettysburg Address’ stirring call still relevant, 156 years later
Lincoln’s words contain the most profound definition of democracy: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
By HASAN ZILLUR RAHIM
PUBLISHED: November 19, 2019

One hundred and fifty-six years ago today, on Nov. 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered an address at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pa., that is as stirring a call for reflection and action in the 21st-century United States as it was in the 19th. Using a mere 272 words and lasting all of two minutes, the 16th president evoked the meaning and purpose of America in the midst of a deadly Civil War that has particular relevance to today’s polarized, diminished and adrift America under President Trump.

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 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 reveal 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. 
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https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/07/03/opinion-thoreau-looms-large-on-independence-day/
Opinion: Thoreau looms large on Independence Day
Bard of Walden’s reflections on nature and human nature are more relevant today than ever
By HASAN ZILLUR RAHIM
PUBLISHED: July 3, 2019
​
One hundred and seventy-four years ago, on July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau, age 28, moved into a 10 x 15 x 8 feet cabin he built himself from pine wood and recycled materials on the shore of Walden Pond in Massachusetts.

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 how I envision 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.

By 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.
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https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/09/06/opinion-raising-california-community-colleges-success-rates/
Opinion: Raising California community colleges’ success rates
Pilot projects have shown that students rise to the challenge of higher expectations. San Jose City College students who are placed appropriately in math and English classes are more likely to graduate and attend four-year schools.
By HASAN ZILLUR RAHIM 
PUBLISHED: September 6, 2018

The dropout and failure-to-graduate rates in California’s 72-district, 114 community colleges serving over 2.1 million students are unacceptable. A study by the Institute for Higher Education Leadership at Cal State Sacramento found that 70 percent of community college students fail to graduate or transfer to a four-year institution. These students typically drop out without any degree but with considerable debt.

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 Zillur Rahim is a professor of mathematics at San Jose City College.
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https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/24/opinion-stop-with-the-selfies-and-experience-wonder-especially-at-the-observatory/
Stop with the selfies and experience wonder – especially at the observatory
By HASAN ZILLUR RAHIM
PUBLISHED: July 24, 2017

At the Montgomery Hill Observatory of Evergreen Valley College in San Jose, there is a public stargazing night on the first Friday of every month. It is here that a decade ago I first saw Saturn through the observatory’s 7” refractor telescope. I will never forget that magical moment. The “Lord of the Rings” planet 750 million miles or so away from the earth seemed so inviting that I wanted to reach out and touch it.
With Jupiter and Saturn gracing the night sky now, I decided to visit the observatory after a hiatus to renew my acquaintance with the two planets.
 
About 50 of us gathered at the observatory recently to take in the beauty of the starry sky. The line was long for the domed building that housed the telescope focused on Saturn.

What I witnessed, however, was unexpected and, frankly, shocking.

Most of the “stargazers” spent more time taking selfies than looking at the planet. Parents held their babies close to the telescope and snapped photos as the unnatural light of their smartphones lit up the dark interior of the building. They photographed the telescope’s view of Saturn, experimenting until the image was to their satisfaction.

What I found incongruous was that everyone acted as if this was normal, that unless Saturn was captured in the circuitry of their hi-tech gadgets, the physical experience of observing the ringed planet through a telescope wasn’t worth much.

It was the same with Jupiter in the adjacent roll-off roof building. Jove and his moons took a backseat to the selfies, to the document-by-camera excitement that gripped so many of the visitors. A remark I overheard put the selfies in perspective. A man turned to his spouse and said, “It’s already on Facebook and Instagram.”

The standalone selfie was apparently not worth much by itself, unless authenticated by social media and “liked.”

I managed to see Saturn, its ring tilted at a steeper angle than when I saw it last, magical and awe-inspiring as always. But the flash and whirr of the cameras seemed so pervasive that afterwards, when I looked up with unaided eyes outside, I half-expected to see the image of a partially-eaten translucent silver apple dominating the night sky.

The selfie syndrome is everywhere, not just at public events and tourist spots but in parks, woods, shores, malls, stadiums, restaurants, even at funerals.

How is it that we have so casually surrendered substance for shadow? Why are we in thrall to our devices 24×7?

One reason is that smart gadgets and social media allow us to unleash our very human instinct for self-expression to a degree unprecedented in history.

But pushed to extreme, self-expression can devolve into narcissism. In particular, in the presence of the sublime and the transcendent, self-expression through selfies, rather than engaging through the senses, can be foolish and short-sighted. It is like ignoring the eternal for the ephemeral.

How to subdue this abnormal selfie craving?

One way would be to renew our acquaintance with nature. “The world is too much with us,” lamented Wordsworth at the dawn of the 19th century when the poet felt that people had lost their connection to nature because of their growing attachment to materialism. “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:/Little we see in nature that is ours/…/For this, for everything, we are out of tune.”

Next time we go to the woods, the shore or the observatory, let’s leave behind the devices with their flickering screens so we can experience with our five senses the music of songbirds, the lullaby of surf, and the pageantry of stars and planets.
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Hasan Zillur Rahim is a Professor of Math/Statistics at San Jose City College. He wrote this for The Mercury News.