Early Birds Get the Equation

The only thing worse than rising at 4:30 in the morning might be taking algebra at 5:30 a.m.

Yet facing down problems like (x-2 y-3 z2)2 over (x2 y3 z-2)2 = before dawn is just what 24 bleary-eyed students are doing Tuesdays at Long Beach City College, where Beginning Algebra is underway. It’s still dark.

“Folks,” professor John Lenhert notes as the clock ticks 5:45 a.m., “anything x to the zero power is 1. Why? Because I said so, right?”

White-haired, exacting and compassionate, Lenhert has been teaching beginning and intermediate algebra at this hour for 20 years, four days a week. Never, he whispered as students factored equations, has class been canceled for lack of enrollment.

That doesn’t mean Lenhert, 68, hasn’t witnessed epidemics of alarm clock failure and flat tire outbreaks in his career at early-bird math class. But he recognizes that most of his students want to be there, if they’ve enrolled in such an uncivilized hour.

They are single parents, workers and teenagers who can’t take the class later because other required courses conflict. But they are all in crack-of-dawn algebra because they aspire to four-year college, Lenhert said.

They are mostly working class, he said, and hardly getting an education the easy way. The parking lot is not well lit, but students have no choice but to drive or carpool. Bus service to the campus doesn’t begin that early. Two students catch rides with relatives when they can, but it puts them in class more than an hour early.

“I just have a lot of respect for these people who come to my class,” Lenhert said, “because it costs them a lot to be here.”

Snuggled into leopard fur slippers and matching spotted pajama pants, Chelsea Dullye, 19, looks freshly rolled out of bed. She is.

“I’ll probably -- [yaaaawn] -- miss more classes than I would have later in the day,” said the psychology major. She juggles her work at a party-supply store around her class schedule and wants to transfer to Cal State Long Beach and become a drug counselor. “But I registered for classes late and it was the only algebra class open.”

Gabriella Hernandez and Victoria Guzman, both 19 and from South Gate, need this class to get into the Cal State Long Beach nursing program but start their fast-food jobs at 9 a.m.

Bridgette Flores, 35, leaves her Signal Hill home at 5:15 a.m. to make class, then heads to her paralegal job at Nextel in Irvine. She has returned to college to set a good example for her children -- at an hour when their father is home to watch them.

Single mother Brenda Molina of Long Beach has raised seven children. Finding time in her day to earn an associate arts degree has been tough, but it’s become easier now that her youngest is 15. She is praying that her ultimate goal -- obtaining a bachelor’s degree -- will help her get a better-paying job.

“It’s a challenge for me to do what I have to do to be here,” said Molina, 41. “Seven kids, yep, yep. I did everything backward. I regret it. But I’m moving on.” Husband? “I was raising him, too.”

Even with her educational progress, it stunned her that she could only make $6.75 an hour as a certified nursing assistant. She wants to work in social services to help children and the elderly.

“Time isn’t waiting for you. It’s taken me 20 years to graduate and this class is the only thing left before I can transfer to [Cal State] Dominguez Hills. You get an education, you get more money.”

At the relatively late hour of 8 a.m., Molina and a few other students chat after class, some of them blowing on their hands to keep warm. Wayne Nichols, 21, a singer from Los Alamitos who aspires to perform professionally, comments that getting up for this class is not as hard as going to bed early the night before.

The music major needed algebra toward his degree and said he heard Lenhert was a good teacher.

“He’s really patient. He doesn’t care how many times he goes over it; he wants you to understand,” Nichols said. In the event Lenhert’s students need help they are reluctant to ask for during class, he arrives Monday through Thursday by 4:45 a.m.

Nichols observed: “I get here at 5 or 5:15, and there’s usually people in here already.”

Indeed, Lenhert and his students say that enrollees of the 8 a.m. algebra classes sometimes attend the 5:30 a.m. session for the more peaceful atmosphere. Likewise, students who miss the earlier class can attend the later one, or take both if they need the help.

The class has a higher initial drop rate than later math classes, but those who stay miss fewer sessions.

“Usually, it is something in their life that keeps them away, like a baby-sitting problem or a sick child or they get a new job,” said Lenhert, who also teaches at East L.A. City College, where he’d like to offer his early-bird special.

He’s convinced the students there would embrace the opportunity, as do their Long Beach counterparts, to get a college education during time that doesn’t conflict with work.

According to the U.S Census Bureau, Long Beach, population 471,000, ranked seventh in the country in the percentage of people living below the poverty level. But Lenhert thinks the high enrollment in early morning classes required of the college-bound students signals hope.

“I would like people to understand that when people need help and they are given an opportunity, they will take it. I think that’s so important for us to know that.”

He knows that 5:30 a.m. is hardly his students’ first choice for learning abstract math. He takes to heart more of his students’ personal stories than they seem to realize. He lists Molina’s mentioning of all her children, and how she reproachfully told him to save his pity, to which he gently explained his duty: to do whatever it takes to teach.

He remembers a particular student’s excuse for absence, and was on the verge of rolling his eyes at the mathematical improbability. Come on, he thought, a flat tire and a dead battery the same morning? Then the student presented receipts for both repairs.

The great effort by so many of his students inspires him to come early, stay late and hold Saturday study sessions in the classroom on his own time.

“When I leave class I go straight to work, and when I leave work I go straight to class,” said Nikki Howell, 22. She sometimes sleeps in her car before her shift starts because her job is closer than her apartment in Huntington Beach and midway between the community college campuses where she carries 21 units.

“I work at Starbucks and when I told my boss I couldn’t open because I had an algebra class, she didn’t believe me. She made me prove it to her with a printout of my class schedule,” Howell said.

According to the college catalog, his Tuesday and Thursday algebra class begins at 5 a.m., but the students collectively decided they would start half an hour later but skip a scheduled 25-minute break.

In the two decades Lenhert has performed this algebraic communion -- by which he and his students seem to bond over their mutual fate, or willingness, to be up this early solving equations -- he figures probably a couple thousand Southern Californians have factored the riddles of x to the 3rd power over y to the negative 4th.

Lenhert’s only regret this Tuesday morning is that there wasn’t a full moon to light the path from college parking lot to the only classroom with a light on. “Oh! That full moon is a wonderful thing to see before class in the morning,” he said, without a wink of irony.