So many ways. As you may or may not know, laws regarding mathematics requirements in higher education have drastically changed in California. Community colleges used to provide an opportunity to the COMMUNITY. Someone who hadn’t been successful in school, or hadn’t been in school for ages could take classes that started from scratch and through these classes gain skills and knowledge to successfully transfer to universities. Anyway… so… math was always a weak subject for students, and most would get placed in a low level non transfer course where it would take them years to get to a transfer level. Some would get stuck and quit. New laws now require (by June 2025) colleges to place students directly in calculus :) it first started with requiring direct placement into college algebra (during pandemic) , then direct placement into trigonometry (started last year and which is where we are now)- and I’m guessing we’re headed towards eliminating community colleges altogether to filter out the “undesired” and only allow access to higher education to the financially privileged. Anyways…let me not make a long story even longer. I have failed because one of the classes I’m teaching trigonometry to students who don’t know basic arithmetic (forget algebra). And 90% of them are badly failing. Therefore I am badly failing.